categorist makes good?

[Peter Freyd <pjf@saul.cis.upenn.edu>]

                  Copyright 2003 Vietnam News Briefs
                         Vietnam News Briefs

                            March 28, 2003

LENGTH: 95 words

HEADLINE: SOCIAL & CULTURAL ISSUES: FEMALE VIETNAMESE SCIENTISTS
RECEIVE FRENCH ORDER

BODY: The French Government has awarded the French Order of Academic
Palms to two Vietnamese scientists, Le Hong Sam and Hoang Xuan Sinh,
for their contributions to boosting cooperation in culture and science
between the two nations. Ms Sam is a researcher on French literature
and currently works for the National University of Social Sciences &
Humanities in Hanoi. Ms Sinh, a mathematician, is the principal of the
Thang Long Open University in Hanoi.

The presentation ceremony was held at the French Embassy in Hanoi on
March 25.


**********************************************************************
  Her papers, as adapted from MathSciNet:

Hoang Xuan Sinh
Gr-categories strictes. (French)
Acta Math. Vietnam. 3 (1978), no. 2, 47--59.
18D10 (20J05 20L10)

A Gr-category is a groupoid  P  which is a monoidal category with
product and unit such that each object  X  of  P  has an inverse
(X', t, p), where  t:X'*X -> 1  and  p:X*X' -> 1. It is called a
strict Gr-category if it is a strict monoidal category and  t  and  p
are identities for every  X. The main theorem of this paper states
that every Gr-category is Gr-equivalent to a strict Gr-category...The
proof of this theorem uses a result of the author's thesis at the
University of Paris VII, 1975 which is that every Gr-category  P  is
determined up to a Gr-equivalence by two groups...As an application of
the results of this paper, the author proves Lemma 9.1 of S. Eilenberg
and S. Mac Lane [Ann. of Math. (2) 48 (1947), 326--341; MR 9, 7] on
the realization of a 3-cocycle as the obstruction of a problem of
extension.

                                      Reviewed by J. L. Williams

Hoang Xuan Sinh
Categories de Picard restreintes. (French)
[Restricted Picard categories]
Acta Math. Vietnam. 7 (1982), no. 1, 117--122 (1983).
18E99

>From the text: "A Picard category is a Gr-category equipped with a
commutativity constraint compatible with its associativity constraint.
A Picard category  P  is said to be restricted if its commutativity
constraint  c  satisfies  c_{x,x}= identity  for all objects  x. We
represent every Picard category by a complex of chains and we deduce
that the classification of restricted prefastened (`preepinglees')
Picard categories of type (M,N) is trivial."