Professor Mok Ngaiming

In his speech introducing Professor Mok at the Award Presentation Ceremony for Excellence in Teaching and Research 2011, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Paul Tam described the DRAA as the most prestigious research award, adding “privately we call it HKU’s Nobel!”

It is fitting then that such an honour should go to Professor Mok, a distinguished mathematician with an outstanding history of excellence in research.

“Professor Mok is a highly talented and devoted researcher of world-class standing,” said Professor Tam, “and, I might add, a very loyal servant of the University. I am particularly delighted that he is now receiving the University’s Distinguished Research Achievement Award.”

In addition to being Chair of Mathematics at HKU, Professor Mok is Director of the Institute of Mathematical Research. He specialises in complex differential geometry, several complex variables and algebraic geometry. He is well-known for having solved a number of outstanding mathematical problems related to curvature and symmetry in geometry.

These include his celebrated work in 1988 resolving the Generalised Frankel Conjecture using evolution equations in partial differential equations and rational curves from algebraic geometry. In the last decade Professor Mok, together with Hwang Jun-muk, laid the foundation of a differential-geometric theory of minimal rational curves, solving a series of difficult classical problems in algebraic geometry.

Since the early 1980s, Professor Mok has been collaborating with mathematicians from Mainland China. In 1989, his article with the late Professor Zhong Jiaqing in Annals of Mathematics was the first article in the Annals co-authored by a mathematician from Mainland China since China opened up in the late 1970s.

His talents are not confined to mathematics – he is also multi-lingual and has lectured on mathematics in English, Putonghua, Cantonese, French, German and Italian. He also reads half a dozen other languages. As Professor Tam joked during the presentation ceremony, “Maybe he should also have an honorary professorship at the School of Languages.”

An avid reader since childhood, Professor Mok’s favourite subjects include cultural history, philosophy, linguistics and poetry.

But mathematics remains his main passion and he has delivered invited lectures on a wide range of subjects within the discipline, including recent plenary talks in key meetings around the world. In 2011 he was Distinguished Lecturer at the National Centre for Mathematical and Interdisciplinary Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and at the Mathematics Research Center of Stanford University.

Being awarded the DRAA, marks the latest in a long list of honours that have been bestowed on Professor Mok. He was a Sloan Fellow in 1984, and received the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the US in 1985, the Croucher Senior Research Fellowship in 1998 and the State Natural Science Award (Class II) in 2007. In 2009, he was awarded the Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society for “his fundamental contributions in several complex variables, in particular, in the geometry of Kähler and algebraic manifolds.”