From August 13 to 21, the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) took place at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul.  Held once every four years, ICM is the largest congress in the mathematics community; during the opening ceremony, the Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, and the Chern Medal are awarded.  At this year’s ICM, Yonsei Professor Kim Byoung-han was an invited speaker in the “Logic and Foundations” section, giving a talk entitled“Amalgamation functors and homology groups in model theory.”

Professor Kim’s research has garnered international recognition, and last year he was the recipient of the Korean Mathematical Society Research Paper Award. Earning his bachelor’s degree (1985) and master’s degree (1987) from Yonsei, Professor Kim completed his Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic at the University of Notre Dame in 1996—writing a doctoral dissertation that was awarded the highly-coveted Sacks Prize.  Following graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fields Institute in Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley before moving to MIT, where he was appointed Assistant Professor in 2000.  Professor Kim, whose monograph Simplicity Theory was published last year by Oxford University Press, returned to Yonsei as a faculty member in 2005.