Class
| • | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | [X] |
| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Jean Dalibard | | | Institution: | Collège de France | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1958 | | | | | | |
Jean Dalibard was educated at Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1986 with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji. He worked at the French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) for the first part of his carrier, before joining Collège de France in 2012 where he holds the chair Matter and Radiation. He has also been a Professor at Ecole polytechnique for more than 20 years.
Dalibard’s scientific work is concerned with atomic physics and optics, more specifically with the control of the motion of atoms with light. The starting point of this research field is quite paradoxical: by shining laser beams on a gas, it is possible to cool it to extremely low temperatures, less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Such a low temperature can give rise to novel states of matter whose behavior, governed by Quantum Mechanics, is radically different from a normal fluid. Together with Cohen-Tannoudji, Dalibard contributed to the understanding of the mechanisms at the origin of this phenomenon, working notably on Sisyphus cooling and on the magneto-optical trap. Later, Dalibard and his team studied experimentally the properties of these gases when they are set in rotation, and they could observe the nucleation of a lattice of quantized vortices resulting from this circular motion. During the last decade, his research has been focused on the "physics of Flatland", i.e. the specific properties of a fluid when it is constrained to move only in a plane instead of the usual three-dimensional space. The long-term goal of his research is to develop cold atom setups that can emulate other physical systems that are yet poorly understood - in condensed matter physics for example - in order to bring experimental answers to important pending questions.
Jean Dalibard has received several awards, notably the Davisson-Germer Prize from the American Physical Society, the Max Born award from the Americal Physical Society and the Prix Jean Ricard form the French Physical Society. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, of the European Academy of Science, the Academia Europaea, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has been a visiting scientist in a number of places outside France, notably NIST Gaithersburg and Cambridge University in the UK. | |
| 22 | Name: | Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac | | | Year Elected: | 1938 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1902 | | | Death Date: | 10/20/84 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Ewine van Dishoeck | | | Institution: | Leiden Observatory, Leiden University; International Astronomical Union | | | Year Elected: | 2020 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Ewine van Dishoeck is professor of molecular astrophysics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Graduated from Leiden in 1984, she held positions at Harvard, Princeton and Caltech before returning to Leiden in 1990. The work of her group innovatively combines the world of chemistry with that of physics and astronomy to study the molecular trail from star-forming clouds to planet-forming disks. She has mentored several dozens of students and postdocs and has been heavily involved in planning of new observational facilities such as the Herschel Space Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array. Her awards include the 2000 Dutch Spinoza Prize, the highest scientific honor in the Netherlands, the 2015 Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the 2018 James Craig Watson Medal of the National Academy of Sciences, and the 2018 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. She is a Member or Foreign Associate of several academies, including that of the Netherlands, USA, Germany and Norway. Since 2007, she is the scientific director of the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy
(NOVA). From 2018-2021, van Dishoeck serves as the president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the worldwide organization of professional astronomers. van Dishoeck has a passion for outreach to the general public and a special interest in art and astronomy. In 2019, she co-curated an exhibition on Cosmos: Art & Knowledge.
Ewine van Dishoeck was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2020. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Christopher Martin Dobson | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | Death Date: | September 8, 2019 | | | | | | |
Christopher Dobson's research greatly clarified the process of protein misfolding and its link to degenerative diseases. As a result, he contributed to the scientific understanding of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. He published over 800 papers and review articles. Additionally, his publications are unusually impactful, being cited frequently in the research of others. In addition to leading his productive research group, Dobson effectively performed the role of Master of St. John's College, notably by leading the expansion of full bursaries for disadvantaged students. Among his numerous honors is the Royal Medal, awarded to him in 2009 by the Royal Society, of which he was a member. Christopher Dobson was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. He died September 8, 2019 in London, England at the age of 69. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. Andrei N. Kolmogorov | | | Year Elected: | 1961 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 10/20/87 | | | | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. Andrei D. Sakharov | | | Year Elected: | 1978 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1921 | | | Death Date: | 12/14/89 | | | | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. André Weil | | | Institution: | Institute for Advanced Study | | | Year Elected: | 1995 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1906 | | | Death Date: | 8/6/98 | | | | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Jack David Dunitz | | | Institution: | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich | | | Year Elected: | 1997 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | September 12, 2021 | | | | | | |
Jack Dunitz's research interests concentrated on the use of crystal structure analysis as a tool for studying a diversity of chemical problems, such as the structure and reactivity of medium-ring compounds, ion-specificity of natural and synthetic ionophores, and molecular structure-energy relationships. From his laboratory came the method of deriving model pathways for prototypic chemical reactions from the structural information in crystal structures, thus making a connection between the "statics" of crystals and the "dynamics" of reacting chemical systems. Other work in related directions included new interpretations of atomic displacement tensors in crystals in terms of internal molecular motions, and studies of experimental electron density distributions from accurate low-temperature X-ray data. Later in his career, he turned to problems of polymorphism, phase transformations in solids and solid-state chemical reactions. Dr. Dunitz studied chemistry at Glasgow University (Ph.D. 1947) and held research fellowship at Oxford University (1946-1948, 1951-1953), the California Institute of Technology (1948-1951, 1953-1954), the U.S. National Institute of Health (1954-1955) and the Royal Institution, London (1956-1957) before accepting a professorship at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1957. He held that post until his retirement in 1990, when he became Emeritus Professor of Chemical Crystallography. Dr. Dunitz been elected to membership of several learned societies, including the Royal Society (1974) and has received several awards for his work. In 2001 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has more than 300 scientific papers to his credit and is the author of "X-Ray Analysis and the Structure of Organic Molecules" (1979) and "Reflections on Symmetry in Chemistry... and Elsewhere" (1993). Jack Dunitz died on September 12, 2021 at age 98. | |
| 29 | Name: | Professor Peter P. Edwards | | | Institution: | University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2012 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1949 | | | | | | |
Peter P. Edwards is currently Professor and Head of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and has held this position since 2003. Born in, England, he received his Ph.D. from Salford University in 1974. He has won a number of awards, including the Liversidge Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1998), the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (2003), and the Corday-Morgan Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2006). He is a member of the Royal Society (1996) and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (2009).
Peter Edwards’s work spans from inorganic and physical chemistry to condensed matter physics in both their purest and most applied aspects. He is the leading chemist studying the metal/insulator transition and superconductivity. He developed and championed a simple criterion for the metal-insulator transition applicable to many systems, including expanded fluid metals, hydrogen in the outer planets, transition metal oxides and doped semi-conductors. Motivated by the size induced metal/insulator transition, he discovered a wide variety of stoichiometrically defined metallic cluster compounds. Before the discovery of cuprates, Edwards identified doped transition metal oxides as possible superconductors, beginning with the superconducting spinel . He later discovered both the mercury-lead-based compounds which held the record high temperature transition and the fluoride-oxide superconductors. Edwards leads the U.K. Sustainable Hydrogen Energy Consortium. His scientific joie de vivre is illustrated by his paper on the materials aspects of Stradivarius violins. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012. | |
| 30 | Name: | Professor Manfred Eigen | | | Institution: | Max Planck Institute | | | Year Elected: | 1968 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1927 | | | Death Date: | February 6, 2019 | | | | | | |
German biophysicist Manfred Eigen was the director of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. Recognized throughout the world for his outstanding work in the field of chemical kinetics, he received the Nobel Prize in 1967, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, for his study of extremely fast chemical reactions induced in response to very short pulses of energy. He also made significant contributions to the theory of the chemical hypercycle, the cyclic linkage of reaction cycles as an explanation for the self-organization of pre-biotic systems. A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Eigen was the recipient of many awards, including the Otto Hahn Prize for Chemistry and Physics and the Kirkwood Medal and Harrison How Award of the American Chemical Society. In addition to his standing as a preeminent scientist, Dr. Eigen was also known for his courteous manner and his love of the piano, which he often played with chamber groups. Manfred Eigen died February 6, 2019 in Goettingen, Germany at the age of 91. | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Ronald D. Ekers | | | Institution: | CSIRO, Australia Telescope National Facility | | | Year Elected: | 2003 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1941 | | | | | | |
Professor Ron Ekers was appointed Foundation Director of CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility in 1988 and he continued in this role until March 2003, when he took up his Federation Fellowship. He graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1963 and gained his Ph.D. in astronomy at the Australian National University in 1967. His professional career has taken him to the California Institute of Technology, the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, UK, the Kapteyn Laboratory in Groningen, The Netherlands, and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. He was director of the VLA, the major national radio telescope in the USA, from 1980 until 1987. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, a Foreign Member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science and a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the president of the International Astronomical Union. Dr. Ekers's research interests include extragalactic astronomy, especially cosmology, galactic nuclei and radio astronomical techniques. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Leo Esaki | | | Institution: | Tsukuba International Congress Center & University of Tsukuba | | | Year Elected: | 1991 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | | | | |
Born in Osaka, Japan, physicist Leo Esaki has made many fundamental contributions pertaining to the physics of semiconductor materials. In his early work he demonstrated electron tunnelling in special semiconductor structures, which became known as tunnel or Esaki diodes. This work earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973. In 1960 Dr. Esaki joined the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and became an IBM Fellow in 1967. More recently he helped establish the field of superlattice physics, creating a new class of artificial materials which display remarkable electronic properties. Known for his technical leadership and accomplishments, Dr. Esaki also possesses a strong interest in the interaction of science with societal issues on an international scale. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Science and the Japan Academy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo in 1959 and has been awarded the Japanese Government Order of Culture and the American Physical Society's International Prize for New Material, among other honors. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Bernard Fanaroff | | | Institution: | Square Kilometre Array South Africa; South African Radio Astronomy Observatory Project | | | Year Elected: | 2022 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 101. Astronomy | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Bernie Fanaroff was the Director of the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Radio Telescope Project from its initiation in 2003 until 2015. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a Founder Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He has been awarded the South African national Order of Mapungubwe, the Karl Jansky Lectureship of Associated Universities Inc and the NRAO, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Research Foundation, the Science for Society Gold Medal of the Academy of Science of South Africa and several honorary degrees. He was a Visiting Professor at Oxford University.
He has a BSc Honours degree in physics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a PhD in radio astronomy from Cambridge University. During his PhD he published the Fanaroff-Riley classification of radio galaxy and quasar morphology with fellow student Julia Riley, which continues to be a basic classification of the jets which carry energy away from the accretion disks surrounding super-massive black holes in the centres of most galaxies.
He left academia in 1976 to become a national organizer in South Africa of the nascent Metal and Allied Workers Union, one of the new non-racial unions then being organized in opposition to the legally-recognised unions which excluded Black workers, who had no rights under apartheid. He became a national secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa in 1987. When Nelson Mandela became President after the first democratic election in 1994, he became Deputy Director General in the Office of the President and Head of the Office for the Reconstruction and Development Programme, government’s central programme to build the country after apartheid. He became Deputy Director General of the Secretariat for Safety and Security in 1997 and chaired the Integrated Justice System Board and the Inter-Departmental Committee for Border Control. He led the drafting of the new Firearms Control Act. He left government in 2000.
He led the bid by South Africa, with eight other African countries, to host the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array Radio Telescope. The bid was successful in 2012. The SKA South African team also designed and built the MeerKAT radio telescope, a world-leading telescope which has made major discoveries in the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies and in pulsar and transient radio source discovery and timing, as a result of its unique sensitivity, timing accuracy and imaging quality. The MeerKAT will become part of the SKA Mid-Frequency Array in the late 2020s.
SKA South Africa developed a world-leading Human Capital Development Programme, which enabled the development of a large and thriving radio astronomy science and technology community in South Africa from the initial five radio astronomers in 2003. It also trains scientists and engineers from the eight African partner countries. The SKA SA HCD programme led to the successful Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) and the DARA Big Data programmes in partnership with the UK Government’s Newton Fund.
He was an adviser to the Director of the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory, the successor to the SKA South Africa project. He has been appointed by the Minister for Trade, Industry and Competition to lead the development and implementation of a tripartite plan for the recovery and growth of the steel and steel products industries in South Africa. He is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Breakthrough Listen project of the Breakthrough Initiatives and a Trustee of the Paleontological Scientific Trust. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Ben L. Feringa | | | Institution: | Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; University of Groningen | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1951 | | | | | | |
Ben L. Feringa obtained his PhD degree at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands under the guidance of Professor Hans Wynberg. After working as a research scientist at Shell in the Netherlands and the UK, he was appointed lecturer and in 1988 full professor at the University of Groningen and named the Jacobus H. van't Hoff Distinguished Professor of Molecular Sciences in 2003. He is member and former vice-president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. He was elected Foreign Honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The German Academy Leopoldina, the Chinese National Academy of Sciences, Foreign member of the Royal Society (London) and Member of the US National Academy. Ben Feringa is member of European Research Council ERC. In 2008 he was appointed Academy Professor and was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen of the Netherlands and in 2016 promoted to Commander in the order of the Dutch Lion. Feringa’s research has been recognized with a number of awards including the Koerber European Science Award (2003), the Spinoza Award (2004), the Prelog gold medal (2005), the Norrish Award of the ACS (2007), the Paracelsus medal (2008), the Chirality medal (2009),the RSC Organic Stereochemistry Award (2011), Humboldt award (2012), the Nagoya gold medal (2013), ACS Cope Scholar Award 2015, Chemistry for the Future Solvay Prize (2015), the August-Wilhelm-von-Hoffman Medal (2016), the Tetrahedron Prize 2017, the Euchems gold medal and the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with J.-P. Sauavage and Sir J.F. Stoddart).
Feringa’s research interest includes stereochemistry, homogeneous catalysis, organic synthesis, asymmetric catalysis, molecular switches and motors, supramolecular chemistry, self-assembly, molecular nanosystems and photopharmacology. | |
| 35 | Name: | Sir Alan Roy Fersht | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge | | | Year Elected: | 2008 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1943 | | | | | | |
Alan Fersht is the Herchel Smith Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cambridge University and Director of the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering. He enjoys combining the methods of chemistry with those of molecular biology for studying complex problems in the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine. In particular, he works in the general area of the structure, activity, stability and folding of proteins, and the role of protein misfolding and instability in cancer and disease. He was the first to apply site-directed mutagenesis to analyze the structure and activity of proteins and the strength and specificity of protein interactions and is one of the founders of protein engineering. His current work is mainly in two specific areas. The first is in elucidating at atomic resolution how proteins fold and unfold, using advanced structural and biophysical methods on engineered proteins. His method of Phi-value analysis of mutated proteins is now the standard procedure for experimentally characterizing transition states for protein folding and unfolding and benchmarking simulation at atomic resolution. The second is using the same structural and biophysical methods to study how mutation affects proteins in the cell cycle, particularly the tumor suppressor p53, in order to design novel anti-cancer drugs that function by restoring the activity of mutated proteins. Alan Fersht is a fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences, an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a member of EMBO and Academia Europea. He has won several international awards, including the FEBS Anniversary Prize (1980); the NOVO Biotechnology Award (1986); the Charmian Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1986); the Gabor Medal of the Royal Society (1991); the Max Tishler Lecture and Prize, Harvard University (1992); the FEBS Data Lecture and Medal (1993); the Jubilee Lecture and Harden Medal of the Biochemical Society (1993); the Feldberg Foundation Prize (1996); the Distinguished Service Award for Protein Engineering, Miami Nature Biotechnology Winter Symposium (1997); the Davy Medal of the Royal Society (1998); the Chaire Bruylants (1999); the Natural Products Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1999); the Anfinsen (1999) and Stein and Moore (2001) Awards of the Protein Society; the Bader Award of the American Chemical Society; the Linderstrom-Lang Prize and Medal (2002); the Bijvoet Medal (2008); the G.N. Lewis Medal (2008), and the Copley Medal of the Royal Society (2020). He was knighted in 2003 for his work on protein science, and he has honorary degrees from Uppsala, Brussels, Weizmann Institute, Imperial College, The Hebrew University, and Arhus University. He is associate editor of PNAS, senior editor of PEDS, and co-chairman of the editorial board of ChemBioChem. Alan Fersht was elected an international member of the American Philosophical Society in 2008. | |
| 36 | Name: | Emil Fischer | | | Year Elected: | 1909 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1852 | | | | |
| 37 | Name: | James Franck | | | Year Elected: | 1937 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1882 | | | Death Date: | 5/21/62 | | | | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. Fabiola Gianotti | | | Institution: | CERN | | | Year Elected: | 2019 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 106. Physics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1960 | | | | | | |
Fabiola Gianotti is currently Director-General at CERN. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Milano in 1989.
As a Ph.D. student, Fabiola Gianotti worked on one of the first proton-antiproton collider experiments at CERN, the UA2 detector, which together with UA1, discovered the carriers of the weak force, the massive W and Z bosons. Next, Gianotti was involved in the ALEPH detector at the Large Electron Positron (LEP) collider at CERN, which made precision measurements establishing the Standard Model of Particle Physics. She was a leader in the design, building, and data analysis of ATLAS, one of the two detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, which announced in 2012 the discovery of the Higgs boson, the final piece in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. In 2016, she became the Director-General of CERN and is overseeing the operation and the upgrades of the world’s most complex and expensive science experiment, as well as being a leader in the design of the next global particle accelerator. Her research career is distinguished by her hardware skills (electronics on UA2 and liquid Argon calorimetry for LHC), software and analysis expertise (ATLAS), and leadership (ATLAS). In a field dominated by men for more than 100 years, Gianotti has established herself as the most influential high-energy physicist in the world today.
Among her awards are the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2013, the Enrico Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society in 2013, the Medal of Honour of the Niels Bohr Institute in 2013, and the Magellanic Premium of the American Philosophical Society in 2018. She is a member of the Italian Academy of Sciences (2012), the National Academy of Sciences (2015), French Academy of Science (2015), and Royal Society, 2018. Fabiola Gianotti was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Vitalii I. Gol'danskii | | | Institution: | Academy of Sciences of the USSR & NN Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics | | | Year Elected: | 1989 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 102. Chemistry and Chemical Biochemistry | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1923 | | | Death Date: | January 14, 2001 | | | | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. William Timothy Gowers | | | Institution: | University of Cambridge & Trinity College | | | Year Elected: | 2010 | | | Class: | 1. Mathematical and Physical Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 104. Mathematics | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1963 | | | | | | |
Early in his career, Timothy Gowers did outstanding work in abstract Banach space theory, a theory which involves sets which are operators or functions. In a series of brilliant papers, he solved several long-standing problems, introducing extensive use of methods from combinatorial number theory. One of his surprising results is the construction of a Banach space with almost no symmetry. He is now better known to the broad mathematical community by his later work in combinatorial number theory. His very original ideas (for example "Gowers norms"), led to a new proof of Szmeredi's theorem, which concerns the occurrence of arithmetic progressions in sets of integers. His ideas have led to many breakthroughs in the field, in particular concerning the occurrence of arithmetic progressions in the primes (a longstanding conjecture of Erdos and now a theorem of Gowers’ students Ben Green and Terry Tao.) He continues to lead the research in this combinatorial number theory, which is now having impact on and benefiting computer science. Gowers has also put much effort into bringing mathematics to the public in his writing which includes his book Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and his many public lectures. He recently organized the writing of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008). This is a book of over 1,000 pages, incorporating sections by over 100 of the world's best mathematicians. It is aimed at giving anyone with some undergraduate training in mathematics a taste of current knowledge in all of modern mathematics. This kind of contribution, by one of the world's leading researchers at the height of his productive years, is very unusual. | |
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