Professor Minsung Kim Selected as an 18th POSCO Science Fellow



Professor Minsung Kim of the POSTECH Department of Mathematics has been selected as a POSCO Science Fellow (18th cohort) by the POSCO TJ Park Foundation. Professor Kim received the fellowship certificate at a ceremony held at the POSCO Center in Seoul on October 1.

The POSCO Science Fellowship is the foundation's flagship program for outstanding early-career scientists who have been appointed to Korean universities within the past three years, supporting them as they grow into world-class researchers. Since its launch in 2009, the program has selected a total of 575 scientists over 18 years and provided 39.5 billion won in research funding. This year, with the addition of a new environment category, 32 fellows were selected across seven fields: mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, metals and advanced materials, energy materials, and the environment. Each fellow receives a total of 100 million won in research funding over two years.

Professor Kim was selected in the field of mathematics for the research project "KAM-rigidity on affine abelian higher rank actions on nilmanifolds." In dynamical systems, rigidity refers to the property that a group action, when slightly perturbed, retains essentially the same structure as the original action. The iterative linearization technique of Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser (KAM) theory is one of the principal methods for proving such rigidity, and it has so far been applied mainly to actions with hyperbolicity. Professor Kim plans to study rigidity problems for parabolic affine actions, which lack hyperbolic components, focusing in particular on actions defined on nilmanifolds rather than tori. The central challenge of the project is to develop new methods for solving cohomological equations and new tame estimates to handle the small divisor problem without relying on hyperbolicity.

At the ceremony, Distinguished Professor Taeghwan Hyeon of Seoul National University delivered a special lecture, sharing insights from years of identifying original research questions and building a distinctive research field.

Congratulations to Professor Kim on this achievement.

※ Related article: POSCO Newsroom (Korean), October 1, 2026