Welcome to Hai Long Dao's webpage
About myself
I was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam. I came to
the University of Sydney in 1997 and got my Bachelor of Science there
in 2000. I came to the US in Jan 2001, and spent a semester at the University
of Maine. Finally, I settled down at the Mathematics Department at University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
for my PhD and finished in April 2006. Since August 2006 I have been a pretty happy
post-doc at the University of Utah. Below is a picture of me
in front of the Daily Show headquater in NY. (I started watching it in 2001, before most people in my house, which holds 30 American undergrads, noticed me laughing histerically every night around 11pm ! So I think I did contribute to its popularity. You're welcome, Jon! ) A more serious account
of my (academic) history is my CV .
My research interest has been Commutative Algebra. The main motivation for my research is a group of
questions known as "the homological conjectures". Amazingly, there is an
wiki entry for them, in case you are curious.
The main reason I am working on them is my advisor,
Mel Hochster. He has been obsessed with these problems for over 30 years and some of his best work were motivated
by them. Needless to say, the remaining questions are pretty hard, but it does not prevent him from trying
them on his students ! 3 years into the program, I seriously considered switching to Economics, since compared
to Serre's Positivity Conjecture, the global poverty problem seemed at least doable! Fortunately,
Mel's constant encouragement and kindness (plus his enormous grant) helped me through, and now I enjoy thinking about them a whole lot more. In fact, these are beautiful problems, and it is quite easy to fall in love with them. Trouble is, your love
is almost never returned (just like high school !). As often with doomed love affairs, this one did bring out some
unintended consequenses, a summary of which you can find here .
Commutative Algebra Seminar
This year I am running the Commutative Algebra seminars . Let me know if you would like to give a talk. We always go
to Big Ed for some beers after the talks, and the beers are free for the speaker!
Teaching
Math 1220 (Spring 2008)
Math 1100
Math 4400
Personal
More about me here (Warning: the content is PG-13. Thanks to Dan Ciubotaru for alerting me
about this).