The Department of Mathematics is the oldest of its kind in Hong Kong and is held in high regard by its many graduates and postgraduates, who have benefitted greatly from an education that nurtures abilities in quantitative reasoning, logical and analytical thinking, conceptualization, and problem solving, among other skills. The department maintains strong links with the community, and has gained a firm reputation for its research work..

The Institute of Mathematical Research was established in 1999, with Professor Ngaiming Mok as Director – a position he maintains to the present day. Professor Mok is a specialist in Complex Differential Geometry, Several Complex Variables and Algebraic Geometry. His research interests cover a broad range of subject areas and he has published 80 research articles, including 10 in the flagship journals Annals of Mathematics and Inventiones Mathematicae. 

Among his celebrated achievements to date, Professor Mok has resolved several major mathematical problems. These include his resolution in 1988 of the Generalized Frankel Conjecture in Complex Differential Geometry on compact Kähler manifolds of nonnegative bisectional curvature by methods of the Ricci Flow and Algebraic Geometry; his solutions with Professor Hwang Jun-Muk at KIAS, Seoul in 1999 and 2004 of the Lazarsfeld Problem in Algebraic Geometry by the introduction of a new geometric theory on uniruled projective manifolds; and his recent solution in 2009 with Dr Ng Sui-Chung at HKU of a problem of Clozel-Ullmo’s in Arithmetic Dynamics on germs of measure-preserving maps on bounded symmetric domains. 

After high school in Hong Kong, Professor Mok studied at the University of Chicago and then at Yale University, obtaining his MA at Yale in 1978 and his PhD at Stanford University in 1980. He then worked at Princeton University and was Professor at Columbia University and at the Université de Paris (Orsay) before taking up a Chaired Professorship at The University of Hong Kong in 1994. He has also been Director of the Institute of Mathematical Research since 1999. 

Professor Mok was an Alfred Sloan Fellow in 1984, and he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award in Mathematics of the United States in 1985, the Croucher Senior Fellowship Award in Hong Kong in 1998 and the State Natural Science Award of China in 2007. Recently Professor Mok received the 2009 Bergman Prize of the American Mathematical Society, for which he was cited as having made fundamental contributions in Several Complex Variables, in particular in the geometry of K?hler and algebraic manifolds. 

Professor Mok has been entrusted with important duties in the international mathematical community. He has been serving on the Editorial Boards of Inventiones Mathematicae and Mathematische Annalen, as well as other mathematical journals in China and in France. He served as a core member of the subject panel of Algebraic and Complex Geometry at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid 2006, and was a member of the Fields Medal Committee for ICM 2010. Professor Mok was an invited speaker at ICM 1994 in Zurich and has given numerous plenary lectures in mathematical conferences of a wide range of subject areas around the world.