From left to right are Prof. Sang Geun Hahn, Prof. Dong Youp Suh, and Prof. Jaehoon Kim.

The Annual Meeting 2019 of the Korean Mathematical Society (KMS) was held on October 25-17, 2019 at Hongik University in Seoul. During the conference, KMS presented awards to some of the leading mathematicians in Korea. Among them were Professors Sang Geun Hahn, Dong Youp Suh, and Jaehoon Kim.

Professor Sang Geun Hahn received the Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the progress of the nation’s mathematics as an educator, scholar, and researcher. His research interests lie in algebra and its applications. He has pioneered the development of cryptology and coding theory, preparing the ground for advances in industrial mathematics. Many of his students are now working in industry and research sectors such as National Research Council of Science and Technology and Samsung Electronics. He has been a member of the faculty at KAIST since 1989.

The KMS selected two fellows including Professor Dong Youp Suh for this year’s Academic Achievement Award. This award is given to recipients who has established a track record of outstanding performance in research. Professor Suh began his research on smooth actions of differential manifolds, which has gradually broadened into real algebraic manifolds and semi-algebraic sets. In recent years, he has been working on the field of Hamiltonian group actions on symplectic manifolds and the study of topological toric manifolds. He joined KAIST in 1985 and has served as a member of the faculty since then.

Professor Jaehoon Kim won the Sang-san Young Mathematician Award. The award recognizes the work of promising young mathematicians who have received their PhD within the last five years. Professor Kim advanced the Blow-up Lemma established by Komlós, Sárközy, and Szemerédi into a more generalized model and developed a theorem that can be applied to solving graph decomposition problems. Based on these results, he was technically able to solve a few conjectures that have been considered important for a long time. His research has been published in some of the prestigious mathematics journals such as the Journal of the European Mathematical Society and Random Structures and Algorithms. He started working at KAIST from July 2019.