Professor Klaus Krickeberg: 50-year journey with Vietnam

On the night of November 27, 2025, Professor Klaus Krickeberg passed away peacefully in his sleep in Bielefeld, Germany, at the age of 96. 'Klaus passed away peacefully in his sleep,' announced his partner, Helga Zeile.

The Friendship Medal awarding ceremony for Professor Klaus Krickeberg at the Ministry of Health on February 25, 2019, which was also the 90th birthday of Professor Klaus Krickeberg - Photo: provided by the author

Klaus Krickeberg is a man who loves Vietnam very much, is a great friend of Vietnam, has accompanied Vietnam and helped tirelessly for nearly half a century. I would like to tell a few stories as one of his students.

In recognition of the contributions to the construction of Vietnam over the past 50 years, especially for research, training, application of statistical sciences and for the consolidation of the Vietnamese public health sector and the development of friendly relations between the peoples of Germany, France and Vietnam.

Comments from Ho Chi Minh City National University on the occasion of awarding an honorary doctorate to Professor Klaus Krickeberg

Excellent mathematician

In 1967, I came from Bonn to Heidelberg University to "find a teacher to study" and coincidentally met him without knowing that at that time he was already more "patriotic" to Vietnam than I was and had a very early sense of commitment.

In 1964-1965, he sent money to Vietnam Hilfsaktion, a humanitarian organization in the Federal Republic of Germany that helps Vietnam. Klaus Krickeberg, a member of the post-war German elite, was the first probability mathematician to help rebuild the field of probability from scratch after the Nazis destroyed Germany's top science .

He was invited to give lectures almost everywhere: America, Denmark, France, the Soviet Union... He was given many honors such as being elected president of the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability for the 1977-1979 term and in 1983 was elected as an academician of the "German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina", where Albert Einstein and David Hilbert were also members.

During my years in Heidelberg, I often listened to him lecture. It was an art and he was an artist. He only had a small piece of paper with an outline in his pocket when needed. Other than that, he lectured like a speech, fluent, charming, and so interesting. Each lecture was a masterpiece.

Relationship with Vietnam

In the summer of 1974, a major turning point took place in his life. Accepting an invitation from the Vietnam Institute of Mathematics (Hanoi), Klaus Krickeberg took the train from Bielefeld, where he was a professor of probability and statistics, through West Asia to Beijing and then back down to Hanoi, taking about ten days. It marked an "adventure", following the call of his heart, on his career path.

On the way, he took the opportunity to prepare math lessons - in Vietnamese, which he had taught himself, a language he was determined to learn, in preparation for presentations in Hanoi. He was only 45 years old at the time.

In Hanoi, he met the leading intellectuals at that time, the Minister of Education Ta Quang Buu, Professor Le Van Thiem, Ton That Tung... The leading intellectuals were very friendly and had a high spirit of learning. Vietnam (Hanoi) was isolated at that time, so meeting a mathematician from Germany was a very interesting thing. They "ordered" him a lot about research topics using mathematics as an applied tool.

Also in early 1978, another leader of the Vietnamese health sector contacted me. That was virologist Hoang Thuy Nguyen, who had studied in East Germany and later became the director of the "Central Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology", abbreviated as "Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology", formerly the Pasteur Institute in Hanoi, which has the function of preventing and controlling infectious diseases.

Mr. Nguyen asked about mathematical methods in epidemiology. That was the topic of the talk on infectious diseases. His seemingly random question became the source of a collaboration that has continued actively for the next 35 years.

Professor Klaus Krickeberg likes to eat "dust" in Vietnam - Photo: NXX

Learn Vietnamese language and culture

Returning to Bielefeld from his historic trip to Hanoi, he launched a series of activities to support Vietnam, such as organizing a "Vietnam Week" with the student association there, screening the film Ho Chi Minh Trail, organizing the sending of scientific books from Germany to Vietnam, and giving presentations on Vietnamese mathematics in Germany and France.

After his trip to Vietnam, he moved to Paris and was appointed "exceptional professor" (classe exceptionalnelle) at the University of Paris V. He has dual nationality. From a young age, he attended a French high school in Berlin until his baccalaureate in 1946.

In Paris, he enrolled in Vietnamese language and culture courses, earning a bachelor's degree, an extraordinary achievement. He knew many languages, including French, English, Russian, Danish, Spanish, and modern Greek. He had taught in Spanish at the University of Chile. This time, he decided to pursue Vietnamese.

In 1978, after preparing the scale, Klaus Krickeberg returned to Vietnam three times in a row in a year to give lectures and hold seminars in many places, including Ho Chi Minh City, working with many universities, research institutes and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, General Statistics Office, proposing a more experimental way of teaching mathematics in schools...

He continued to teach, do seminars, take care of students, doctoral candidates, send researchers abroad to improve quality. He went to many villages to learn about the Vietnamese health system.

He wrote memos and sent them to the Ministry of Health with proposals. He received support from a number of foreign organizations such as the French Foreign Ministry's 10-year program for training health system staff; the UNICEF program on diarrhea control, expanding immunization and maternal and child health, malaria control, tuberculosis, epidemiology in village systems; the GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) program on family planning; the European Community's "Health Systems Development Program".

From 1980 onwards, in Paris he studied, researched and taught for 12 consecutive years the ideas of "epidemiology" and public health with applied mathematics, things he would apply in Vietnam. The Vietnamese people who worked with him all respected him and considered him a great friend of Vietnam.

Since 1978, Klaus Krickeberg has provided scientific research guidance to many young scientists up to doctoral level, creating conditions for many Vietnamese scientists to attend international conferences in the field.

In 1998 he retired in France, the "Health Systems Program" also ended in 2004 with his 45-page report but he did not retire for Vietnam. He initiated a ten-year project, 2006-2016, funded by the German Foundation "Else Kröner-Stiftung" to develop public health, the starting point of which was Thai Binh University introduced by Professor Hoang Thuy Nguyen. This project was later expanded on a large scale to other provinces.

After 10 years of hard work in three regions, he has concluded that it is necessary to reform the Vietnamese public health sector to raise its status and quality to international standards. More than 600 scientists have participated in the workshops he organized. He has many students and colleagues in many regions of the country.

In 2014, Ho Chi Minh City National University awarded him honoris causa, a noble honorary doctorate, for his great and meaningful contributions to Vietnam.

I visited him in Paris once. His apartment (and Angela Zassenhaus, his girlfriend) was decorated with rattan furniture brought from Vietnam.

He is very fond of and proud to have those handicraft products from Vietnam. They are probably not ordinary bamboo products but symbolic products of a small nation with an indomitable culture and currently fighting for independence and freedom to build a new future that he is committed to helping.

The Vietnamese State awarded the Friendship Medal

In 2019, Klaus Krickeberg turned 90 years old. The Vietnamese government decided to award him the Friendship Medal to thank him for his valuable and persistent contributions. His trip in February 2019 to receive the medal was his 33rd trip to Vietnam, meaning he visited the country once every 1.36 years on average.

With the support of the German Foundation "Else Kröner-Stiftung", he worked with numerous institutes, universities, faculties from the North, Central, South and the Central Highlands. He not only stood on the podium but also went "in the field" to visit commune health stations to see how they operated. He visited over 50 such stations.

Dr. Nguyen Xuan Xanh

Source: https://tuoitre.vn/giao-su-klaus-krickeberg-hanh-trinh-50-nam-voi-viet-nam-20251204110354267.htm