Choi Yoon-seong is the new director of the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences. /Courtesy of POSTECH

Choi Yoon-sung, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), has been appointed director of the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, which is affiliated with the Institute for Basic Science (IBS).

According to the scientific community on the 26th, IBS held its 78th extraordinary board meeting in Jung-gu, Seoul, on the 9th, and appointed Professor Choi as the 7th director of the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, receiving a majority of votes from the board of directors. Approval from the Minister of Science and ICT has also been obtained recently, and the final appointment of the IBS president is expected in early January next year. The term is three years after the appointment.

The new director, Choi, graduated from the Department of Mathematics at Seoul National University and received master's and doctoral degrees in functional analysis from the University of Rochester in the United States. After serving in the Department of Mathematics at Pusan National University, he has been working as a professor in the Department of Mathematics at POSTECH since 1988. He has held key positions such as department chair, academic affairs vice president, and director of the Pohang Mathematical Institute at POSTECH, and was appointed professor emeritus in March.

The new director, Choi, is recognized as an authority in the field of functional analysis and is acknowledged globally for his work on the properties of infinite-dimensional function theory. He has received recognition for his research achievements, winning the Korean Mathematical Society's Academic Award in 2015 and the Educational Award in 2023.

The National Institute for Mathematical Sciences has been without a director since former director Kim Hyun-min resigned about two months before the end of his term in January. With Choi's appointment, the institute will welcome a new director after approximately one year.

The National Institute for Mathematical Sciences is a government-funded research institute established in 2005 under the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI) to research industrial mathematics. In 2012, it was transferred to IBS as an affiliated research institute and is responsible for research applying mathematics to industrial fields, including industrial mathematics and medical mathematics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it contributed to the prevention of infectious disease spread by jointly operating the 'COVID-19 Mathematical Modeling Task Force' with the Korean Mathematical Society.