Vietnam's mathematics has a long tradition and a short digital record.
Vietnam's mathematical record runs from a few dozen surviving treatises to the modern national curriculum. It is the written trace of how mathematics has been done and taught in Vietnam, and almost none of its historical layer has been digitized. There is little reason to expect that to change on its own. Preservation of texts like these has run mostly on foreign grants, and the libraries that hold them often lack the funding and the technology to digitize what they keep.
VietAlpha is a research lab: we bring this record into digital form, study it as history of mathematics, and apply what the work uncovers to the technology that teaches mathematics today. Our work so far covers the modern curriculum; the historical layer is next.
What we publish.
Research notes, engineering write-ups, and lab announcements, published as the work happens.
The digitized materials, in students' hands.
LumiToán is our first application. It is a free public library of the record's modern layer: past exam papers, study guides, and exercises, brought into digital form, verified, and made searchable. Inside the library is Lumi, an AI tutor fine-tuned in-house on our own dataset. More than 10,000 students use LumiToán each month, as of mid-2026. That usage keeps the loop fed: every session runs on the digitized record, and student corrections return to it.
Why the library is free.
Premium one-on-one exam preparation in Vietnam can cost up to 7.2 million VND a month for a single subject. Average income per person in a rural household is about 4.5 million VND a month. The lesson can cost more than the income. The wealthiest families spend up to ten times more than the poorest on out-of-school tutoring. That gap is why LumiToán is free: the student who cannot pay is the person we build for.
Tutoring cost vs. income per person, one subject, monthly
Rural household
Income per person, ~4.5M VND / mo
Group: ~0.5M, 11% of income
1-on-1: up to ~7.2M, 160% of income
Premium 1-on-1 exam prep: up to ~7.2M VND/mo for one subject, 160% of income per person
National average
Income per person, ~5.4M VND / mo
Group: ~0.5M, 9% of income
1-on-1: up to ~7.2M, 133% of income
Group class ~0.5M, 1-on-1 exam prep up to ~7.2M VND/mo, per subject
Income figures: GSO Household Living Standards Survey, 2024 (average income per person/month). Tutoring rates: HCMC and Hanoi tutoring-center price tables, 2024-25; premium exam-prep ~450-600K VND/session. The wealthiest families spend up to 10× more than the poorest on out-of-school tutoring (OECD, 2025).
VietAlpha began as a response to the cost of math tutoring in Vietnam, and the digitized modern materials behind LumiToán were our first work. Our scope has since widened to the whole record: Vietnam's mathematical materials across the centuries, being brought into digital form and studied so they can be used. The full story, and the people behind it, are on the About page.
What we have shipped.
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LumiToán
10,000+ students each month, as of mid-2026.
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ICIA National Award
1st National Youth Innovation Award, Edtech category.
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Dataset
1st Curriculum-aligned math dataset built to the standards of Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training (MoET).
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Partners
4 Institutional and academic partners across Vietnam and the US.
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Infrastructure
2 Cloud support from AWS and Microsoft Azure.
What the press writes.
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Cậu học trò sáng tạo hệ sinh thái học toán CSI (external site)
[The schoolboy who created the CSI math-learning ecosystem]
“…mỗi buổi học bắt đầu bằng một câu hỏi mà học sinh chưa có ngay công cụ để trả lời. Toán học xuất hiện sau đó như ngôn ngữ giúp các em tiến gần hơn đến đáp án.”
Each lesson opens with a question the students cannot yet answer. The mathematics arrives afterward, as the language that carries them closer to it.
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Thử nghiệm hệ sinh thái Toán tư duy kết hợp giải quyết vấn đề (external site)
[Piloting a math ecosystem that joins thinking skills with problem-solving]
“Nếu chỉ quen tìm công thức có sẵn, các em dễ dừng lại khi đề bài thay đổi hình thức. Nếu quen bắt đầu từ câu hỏi, các em có thể phân tích vấn đề, xác định biến số và tự xây dựng một mô hình để kiểm tra điều mình nghĩ”.
A student used to hunting for a ready-made formula stops when the problem changes shape. A student used to starting from the question can take the problem apart, name its variables, and build a model to test their own thinking.
Who we work with.
Sponsors
Institutional partners
Frequently asked questions.
What is VietAlpha?
VietAlpha is a research lab that digitizes and studies Vietnam's mathematical record, from its oldest surviving texts to the current MoET curriculum, and applies what it learns to modern technology. It publishes open, verified datasets and builds free tools for Vietnamese students.
What is "Vietnam's mathematical record"?
The written record of how mathematics was done and taught in Vietnam: a small number of surviving historical treatises, and the modern corpus of MoET textbooks, exam papers, and study materials. Almost none of the historical layer has been digitized, and little of it has been studied as history of mathematics.
What does the lab work on now?
Current work covers the modern curriculum: the Cadmus parsing pipeline, the MoET-aligned reasoning dataset, and LumiToán. Historical materials are the next phase. We are selecting our first historical project and will announce it once the work begins.
What is LumiToán, and is it free?
LumiToán is our first application: a free public library of digitized Vietnamese math materials with an AI tutor, Lumi, fine-tuned on our own dataset. It is free for every student.
How does the research relate to the product?
Directly. The digitized record becomes the dataset, the dataset trains the model, the model runs in the classroom, and classroom corrections return to the record. Each new tool draws on the same record, which makes every next tool cheaper to build and better grounded.
Who builds VietAlpha?
VietAlpha is a research lab of CS Inspiration, conducted in association with Deerfield Academy and led by founder Quang (Harry) Tran. The team and the lab's history are on the About page.
Every tool we ship starts the same way: a page of Vietnamese mathematics, brought into a form that lasts and put into a student's hands.