Professor Moshe Rosenfeld’s Biography

Family history and childhood.

Professor Moshe Rosenfeld’s parents, Nathan Rosenfeld and Zipora Ehrlich, left Poland in 1933 and moved to Israel (then called Palestine). They were escaping anti-Semitic laws and practices that, among other things, prevented them from even attending high school. They dedicated their lives to assuring their own children would get a better education.

Moshe was born in Tel Aviv on August 2, 1937, and lived there until he was eight years old when the family moved to Netanya. Although Moshe loved mathematics from an early age, he was not always a serious student, often escaping to play on at the Mediterranean seashore rather than attend classes. Despite his periodic absence from school, he did well and passed his matriculation examination in 1955 and, like most Israeli students, served in the army until 1958. 

Academic career in Israel and the United States

Moshe began his academic career in 1958 when he entered Hebrew University to study mathematics and physics. There he received his master’s degree in 1963 and his PhD in 1967, writing a dissertation on Extremal Graph Theory. His primary advisors were Professors. Branko Grunbaum and Michael Rabin.

Moshe was called up to serve in the army reserves and fought in the Six Days War in June 1967. During that war he fought against a unit of the Jordanian Arab Legion that was supporting Syria and Egypt’s attempts to defeat Israel. Within six days, Israel defeated the Arab countries’ attempts to invade Israel. 

In August 1967, Moshe accepted a visiting teaching position at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught mathematics for two years. In 1969, he accepted a research position at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he conducted research and taught for two years.

In 1971 Moshe returned to Israel, where he accepted a position at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba. There he became a full professor and taught until 1984.

Moshe then returned to the United States, where he taught at several universities: Western Washington University (1984-86); Pacific Lutheran University (1986-2000); and University of Washington, Tacoma, Institute of Technology from 2000 until he retired in 2008.

During his academic career, Moshe published more than 80 papers in peer-reviewed journals on graph theory and geometry. He co-authored papers with such notable mathematicians as professors Paul Erdos, Branko Grunbaum, Saharon Shelah, Jarik Nesetril, and Bela Bollobash. He has proposed problems in Hamiltonian Prisms over Graphs, Generalized Hamiltonian Cycles in Tournaments, and Odd-Distance Graphs that have become internationally known. Some of his work was funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) grants and was twice a Fulbright scholar in the Czech Republic. 

Moshe  in Vietnam

Moshe Rosenfeld and his wife Sharon Morris first traveled together to Vietnam in 2003. That year he gave a seminar on graph theory at the Department of Mathematics at the Vietnam National University, Hanoi University of Science. There he first met Professor Vu Dinh Hoa, who was then teaching at the Hanoi University of Education. Professor Hoa was a talented problems solver who won the silver medal in the 1974 International Mathematics Olympiad and subsequently coached Vietnamese students who competed in the Olympiad.

When Moshe returned to the University of Washington, Tacoma, the department decided to bring a visiting Vietnamese professor to work collaboratively on research and to help reach out to the Vietnamese students in the department, who often seemed isolated from the other students. In 2005, Dr. Vu Dinh Hoa, whom Moshe had met in 2003, agreed to accept that position. While Dr. Hoa was in Tacoma, he and Moshe developed strong personal and academic ties and began publishing papers together.

In 2007 Dr. Vu Dinh Hoa invited Professor Rosenfeld to help him build a computer science program at FPT, a new private university in Hanoi. During the 2007 visit, Professor Rosenfeld visited the Department of Mathematics, Mechanics and Informatics at the Hanoi University of Science (HUS). There he met the dean, Professor Nguyen Huu Du, and Professor Le Minh Ha who were interested in further cooperation with the University of Washington. 

In 2008 Professors Nguyen Huu Du and Le Minh Ha came to Seattle to sign a memorandum of understanding that developed a cooperation agreement between the two universities. 

In 2010, Moshe began to teach what would be a series of two classes in Discrete Mathematics, followed by a class in Discrete Optimization. In teaching these classes over the years he worked with about 160 talented mathematics students, who were among the best students he had ever taught, and many became lifelong friends. 

Moshe was impressed that many of these students came from villages where their parents were not able to get a good education and who sent them to Hanoi to a high school that would enable them to enter a good university. It reminded him of his own parents, who were not able to get a higher education but made it possible for him to go to the university. 

In 2011 and 2012 Moshe was funded by the Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF), a program of the U.S. State Department. The program was established by President Clinton to help Vietnamese students and faculty to come to the United States for advanced studies and research and bring professors from the United States to teach in Vietnam. 

In 2012, Moshe introduced the first Research Experience Program for Undergraduates at Hanoi University of Science at Vietnam National University. Moshe proposed problems in many different branches of mathematics, including graph theory, number theory, and discrete geometry. The students loved the program and wrote a book to summarize the results they obtained. The program was featured twice on national television. 

While they were still undergraduates, two students, Nam Le Tien and Tran Nhat Tan, published their first research papers based on their work in this program. That year the Ministry of Education recognized Nam Le Tien as the best student in the sciences in Vietnam and Tung T. Nguyen was awarded a Honda YES prize as one of the ten best science students in the country. Moshe received a special award from the rector of the university and the Ministry of Education for his work with the students.

Moshe and Sharon often invited students to come to their apartment to study math and play board and card games. The students usually cooked dinner and sometimes even had cooking competitions, introducing Moshe and Sharon to Vietnamese food. The games were always competitive and fun. Since their hosts could not speak Vietnamese, the students primarily spoke English, giving them an opportunity to improve their language skills.

Moshe continued to teach in Hanoi and conduct seminars at the Institute for Advanced Mathematical Studies until 2018. Many of Moshe’s students have continued to excel in mathematics, receiving doctoral degrees from universities in the United States, France, Germany and Japan. 

Moshe found the experience of teaching in Vietnam a wonderful way to end his academic career.

(Author: Sharon Morris)