Ha-Van Vu is the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics and Professor of Data Science at Yale University. He is well known for his work in additive and probabilistic combinatorics, random matrix theory, and their applications in computational science. In 2010, he and Terence Tao, in full generality, established the Circular Law.

Known as the non-symmetric analog of Wigner Semicircle Law, this was one of the most famous open questions in the theory of random matrix. Since 2018, he has also served as the scientific director of VinBigdata Institute.

Professor Vu received the Polya Prize from the Society of Applied and Industrial Mathematics and the Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society. He has been named a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He was also a recipient of an NSF Career Award and a Sloan fellowship. Professor Vu is an inaugural fellow of the AMS and a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS).

Born in Hanoi, Professor Vu attended classes for gifted students at Chu Van An and Hanoi-Amsterdam high schools. In 1987, he went to Budapest (Hungary) for his undergraduate studies and in 1994, moved to Yale for his graduate studies, obtaining a Ph.D. in 1998. He did his postdoc at IAS (Princeton) and Microsoft Research (Redmond). Before going to Yale in 2011, he taught at UC San Diego and Rutgers.