Overview

Jeong Han Kim is a professor of Computational Science at KIAS who studies combinatorics and mathematics related to the theoretical foundations of computer science. In 1995, he solved a problem regarding Ramsey Number that had remained unsolved for over 60 years and was awarded as the sole recipient of the 1997 Fulkerson Prize for his findings. The Fulkerson Prize is one of the top awards in the field of discrete mathematics and is one of the few major awards presented by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Jeong Han Kim is the only Korean recipient of AMS prizes. He was also selected as an Alfred Sloan Fellow in 1997. The fellowship is well known for having funded 45 fellows who later won Nobel Prizes.

Professor Kim has been recognized as a world-renowned scholar for his outstanding achievements. As a doctoral student, he created the best algorithm for sorting under partial information to date with his doctoral advisor, Jeff N. Kahn. Following his studies, Kim and his postdoc Van H. Vu (a current math professor at Yale University), discovered an inequality that is introduced as a subsection of a commonly used graduate textbook (Probabilistic Method by Alon & Spencer) under the title of "Kim-Vu Polynomial Concentration." In addition, Professor Kim has developed a new random graph model that is useful to analyze the problems of giant components and  k-cores, etc.. After moving to KIAS, Kim has  presented a partial solution to Sidorenko's conjecture, which is another unsolved problem in the field of combinatorics. He has also been working on developing techniques to compare two or more random models. 

In 2006, Kim was one of  first three Korean mathematicians to be a invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). In 2007 he won the Role Model Scientist Award and was appointed as an Underwood Chair professor at Yonsei University. He was also the first person in the field of mathematics to be selected as a primary researcher of the Creative Research Promotion Project and is currently working as an editor for a leading international journal, Random Structures and Algorithms.