At the age of 4, she went with her mother to North Vietnam during Operation Passage to Freedom after signature of the Geneva Accords in 1954, while her father stayed in the South to participate in revolutionary activities.

Her request was denied by Lê Duẩn who urged her to complete her higher academic studies in order to contribute to the post-war development of the country.

Anh was passionate about mathematics and attended a seminar taught by a prominent Soviet mathematician Viktor Maslov (later, in 1984, elected to full membership in the Academy of Sciences of the USSR).

[6] In 1979, she defended her doctorate under the guidance of Maslov with a thesis titled Asymptotics of Multidimensional Phase Integrals (Russian: Асимптотика многомерных фазовых интегралов).

[10] The romance was considered scandalous because Vietnamese students studying abroad were not allowed to have romantic relationships with foreigners and anyone caught red-handed would have to be examined or may be sent back to Vietnam.

In order to avoid trouble, she returned home to marry a Vietnamese student from the same university and wanted to stay in Vietnam to forget her love affair with Maslov.