Hoàng Tụy's early career coincided with the French war (1946–1954), which interrupted his studies.
Hoàng Tụy taught secondary school in Quảng Ngãi province in the Fifth Liberated Zone from 1947 to 1951, during which time he wrote a geometry textbook that was published by the Việt Minh press—perhaps the first time a guerrilla movement published a math book.
[1]: 17–18 In the early 1950s, Hoàng Tụy studied with Lê Văn Thiêm in the university that the Việt Minh had opened in a liberated zone in the far north near the Chinese border.
In December 2007, an international conference on Nonconvex Programming was held in Rouen, France, to pay tribute to him on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in recognition of his pioneering achievements that advanced the field of global optimization.
[1]: 16 Hoàng Tụy's son, Hoang Duong Tuan, is now a full professor at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, where he is working on the applications of optimization in various engineering fields.