Giang Nguyen


Giang Thu Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Australian chess player and mathematician.
She is a senior lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, and a chess Woman FIDE Master. She represented Australia in six Chess Olympiads.

Chess

Nguyen began playing chess at the age of nine. She won the gold medal in Vietnamese Junior Girls Under 13 Championship in 1998, and the silver medal in Vietnamese Junior Girls Under 15 Championship in 1999.
Nguyen first represented Vietnam in the World Rapid Girls Under 14 Championship in 1998. Representing Vietnam, she won a gold medal at the Asian Girls Under 14 Championship in 1999, a silver medal at the 2nd Children of Asia International Children Sports Games in 2000, and a silver medal in the ASEAN Girls Under 16 Championship in 2000.
In 2001, Nguyen moved to Adelaide, Australia. She came equal third in the Australian Junior Championship in Sydney in 2002. Since 2008, Nguyen has been playing chess under the Australian flag. She represented Australia in six Chess Olympiads in Dresden 2008, Khanty-Mansiysk 2010, Istanbul 2012, Tromso 2014, Baku 2016, and Batumi 2018. In 2012, she scored 6/9 and was awarded the Woman FIDE Master title for her result.

Mathematics

Nguyen is now a senior lecturer in Applied Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, having completed her PhD in Mathematics from the University of South Australia in 2009 at the age of 23. Her dissertation, Hamiltonian Cycle Problem, Markov Decision Processes and Graph Spectra, was jointly supervised by Jerzy Filar and Vlad Ejov. She is the youngest PhD graduate of UniSA and the second youngest PhD graduate in South Australia. Nguyen is a 2019 South Australian Tall Poppy Science Award recipient.