Dock Sang Rim Named South Korea National Laureate

Dock Sang Rim (1928-1982), Chair of the Department of Mathematics from 1975 to 1978, has been named a 2020 National Laureate in Science and Technology by South Korea. The award was conferred posthumously on April 21 and attended by the President of the Korean Mathematical Society. Rim was honored for his contributions to the development of an intellectual exchange between South Korea and the U.S. in the field of mathematics. In addition, Rim was the first Korean mathematics professor in the Ivy League. His research laid the cornerstone of algebraic K-theory, including pioneering studies on cohomology.

Rim was born in 1928 in what is now North Korea and fled to South Korea during the Korean War. In the 1950s, he emigrated to the U.S. to study at Indiana University and Columbia University. He came to Penn in 1965 and conducted leading research in algebra and number theory. He was an editor of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and a member of the Korean Academy of Sciences, and was active in the Philadelphia Korean community.