Hong Kong mathematician among 3 winners of China’s Future Science Prize
- Ngaiming Mok was honoured for his work on complex differential geometry in the awards, which were modelled on the Nobel Prize
- The other winners were from mainland China: hepatitis researcher Li Wenhui and Yang Xueming, who studied the dynamics of chemical reactions
Each will take home 6.75 million yuan (US$1 million) for their contributions to the study of geometry, hepatitis and the science of chemical reactions.
Ngaiming Mok from the University of Hong Kong received the Future Science Prize in Mathematics and Computer Science for developing key theories and tools in complex differential geometry, a core field of modern mathematics, which helped solve long-standing puzzles in algebraic geometry and number theory.
Born in Hong Kong in 1956, Mok obtained his PhD from Stanford University. He taught in the US and Europe before joining the University of Hong Kong in 1994. He is now the Edmund and Peggy Tse Professor in Mathematics.
The Life Sciences prize went to Li Wenhui, from Tsinghua University and the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, for his discovery of the receptor of hepatitis B and D virus – a protein called sodium taurocholate cotransporting polypeptide.
The discovery marks “a milestone in hepatitis B virus study” and could help researchers develop a more effective treatment for the disease, the prize’s scientific committee said.
There are 87 million chronic carriers of the hepatitis B virus in China, accounting for about one-third of the global total, according to the World Health Organization.