Timothy Gowers
| Sir Timothy Gowers | |
|---|---|
 Sir Timothy Gowers in May 2012 |
|
| Born | 20 November 1963 Wiltshire, England, UK |
| Citizenship | British |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge University College London |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Thesis | Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces (1990) |
| Doctoral advisor | Béla Bollobás |
| Doctoral students | Pablo Candela David Conlon Ben Green George Petridis Tom Sanders Mark Walters Julia Wolf András Zsák |
| Known for | Functional analysis, combinatorics |
| Notable awards | Gold Medal, IMO (1981) Prize of the European Mathematical Society (1996) Fields Medal (1998) |
| Website | |
| www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10 gowers.wordpress.com |
|
Sir William Timothy Gowers, FRS (/ˈɡaʊərs/; born 20 November 1963) is a British mathematician. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University, where he also holds the Rouse Ball chair, and is a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1998 he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.
Education
Gowers was educated at fee-paying schools, first at preparatory school, attending King's College School, Cambridge as a choirboy in the King's College choir, and then at public school, attending Eton College[1] as a King's Scholar. He completed his Ph.D., with a dissertation entitled Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces,[2] at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás.
Academic Work
Between 1991 and 1995 he was a member of the Department of Mathematics at University College London. He used combinatorial tools in proving several of Stefan Banach's conjectures on Banach spaces and in constructing a Banach space with almost no symmetry, serving as a counterexample to several other conjectures.[3] With Bernard Maurey he resolved the "unconditional basic sequence problem" in 1992, showing that not every infinite-dimensional Banach space has an infinite-dimensional subspace that admits an unconditional Schauder basis. His proof of Szemerédi's theorem by Fourier-analytic methods has also been influential. He has worked in combinatorics, particularly on regularity for graphs and hypergraphs.
Honours
In 1996 he received the Prize of the European Mathematical Society, and in 1998 the Fields Medal for research on functional analysis and combinatorics. In 1999 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2012 was knighted by the British monarch for services to mathematics[4][5] He also sits on the selection committee for the Mathematics award, given under the auspices of the Shaw Prize.
Popularization Work
Gowers has written several works popularizing mathematics, including Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002),[6] which describes modern mathematical research for the general reader. He was consulted about the 2005 film Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. Recently, he has edited The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), which traces the development of various branches and concepts of modern mathematics. For his work on this book, he won the 2011 Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America.[7]
Blogging
After asking on his blog whether "massively collaborative mathematics" was possible,[8] he solicited comments on his blog from people who wanted to try to solve mathematical problems collaboratively.[9] The first problem in what is called the Polymath Project, Polymath1, was to find a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem. After 7 weeks, Gowers wrote on his blog that the problem was "probably solved".[10]
In 2009, with Olof Sisask and Alex Frolkin, he invited people to post comments to his blog to contribute to a collection of methods of mathematical problem solving [11] Contributors to this Wikipedia-style project, called Tricki.org, include Terence Tao and Ben Green [12]
In 2012, Gowers posted to his blog to call for a boycott of the publishing house Elsevier.[13] A petition ensued, branded the Cost of Knowledge project, in which researchers commit to stop supporting Elsevier journals. Commenting on the petition in The Guardian, Alok Jha credited Gowers with starting an Academic Spring.[14][15][16]
Family relations and personal life
His father is composer Patrick Gowers, and his great-grandfather was British civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers (best known for guides to English usage) who was son of neurologist Sir William Gowers. He has five children[17] and plays jazz piano.[1]
In November 2012 he opted to undergo catheter ablation to treat a sporadic atrial fibrillation, after performing a mathematical risk-benefit analysis to decide whether to have the treatment.[18]
Selected research articles
- Gowers, W.T.; Maurey, Bernard (6 May 1992). "The unconditional basic sequence problem". arXiv:math/9205204 [math.FA].
- Gowers, W.T. (2001). "A new proof of Szemerédi's theorem". Geom. Funct. Anal. 11, 465–588.
- Gowers (2007). "Hypergraph regularity and the multidimensional Szemerédi theorem". arXiv:0710.3032v1 [math.CO].
- Gowers, W.T. (2007). "Hypergraph regularity and the multidimensional Szemerédi theorem". Ann. of Math. 166, 897–946.
- Gowers, Timothy, ed. (2008). The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-11880-2.
Popular mathematics books
- Gowers, Timothy (2002). Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192853615.
- Gowers Timothy (2012). What can Pure Mathematics Offer to Society?. World Scientific Publishing. pp. 1–19. ISBN 978-9814329439.
Notes
- ^ a b Sleeman, Elizabeth (2003). The International Who's Who 2004. Routledge. p. 637. ISBN 1-85743-217-7.
- ^ Gowers, Timothy (1990). Symmetric structures in Banach spaces (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. http://ulmss-newton.lib.cam.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=8880.
- ^ 1998 Fields Medalist William Timothy Gowers from the American Mathematical Society
- ^ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 60173. p. 1. 16 June 2012.
- ^ "Queens Birthday Honours list". Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ Gowers, Timothy (August 2002). Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-19-285361-5.
- ^ January 2011 Prizes and Awards, American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2011-02-01.
- ^ Gowers, T.; Nielsen, M. (2009). "Massively collaborative mathematics". Nature 461 (7266): 879–881. Bibcode:2009Natur.461..879G. doi:10.1038/461879a. PMID 19829354.
- ^ Gowers, Timothy (2009-01-27). Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?. Gowers's Weblog. Retrieved 2009-03-30.
- ^ Nielsen, Michael (2009-03-20). "The Polymath project: scope of participation". Retrieved 2009-03-30.
- ^ Gowers, Timothy (2009-04-16). "Tricki now fully live". Retrieved 2009-04-16.
- ^ Tao, Terence (2009-04-16). "Tricki now live". What's new. Retrieved 2009-04-16.
- ^ Geoff Brumfiel, Jeff Tollefson, Eric Hand, Monya Baker, David Cyranoski, Helen Shen, Richard Van Noorden, Nicola Nosengo & Declan Butler (2012). "Ten people who mattered in 2012: Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Cynthia E. Rosenzweig, Adam Steltzner, Cedric Blanpain, Elizabeth Iorns, Jun Wang, Jo Handelsman, Timothy Gowers, Bernardo De Bernardinis, Ron Fouchier". Nature 492 (7429): 335–343. doi:10.1038/492335a.
- ^ Grant, Bob (7 February 2012). "Occupy Elsevier?". The Scientist. Retrieved 12 February 2012.
- ^ Worstall, Tim (28 January 2012). "Elsevier's Publishing Model Might be About to Go Up in Smoke". forbes.com. Retrieved 12 February 2012.
- ^ Alok Jha (9 April 2012), "Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution", The Guardian
- ^ "Status update". Gowers's Weblog. Timothy Gowers. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
- ^ Mathematics meets real life, by Tim Gowers, November 5, 2012.
External links
- Timothy Gowers's blog
- Timothy Gowers's web page
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Timothy Gowers", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews.
- Timothy Gowers at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Timothy Gowers's results at the International Mathematical Olympiad
- 1998 Fields Medalist William Timothy Gowers from the American Mathematical Society
- Video lectures by Timothy Gowers on Computational Complexity and Quantum Computation
- Timothy Gowers – Faces of Mathematics
- BBC News (1998): British academics Tim Gowers and Richard Borcherds win top maths awards
- "Multiplying and dividing by whole numbers: Why it is more difficult than you might think", lecture by Timothy Gowers at Gresham College, 22 May 2007 (available for download as video and audio files)
- Körner, Tom (1999-09). "Interview with Tim Gowers (Cambridge)". Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (33): 8–9.
- William Timothy Gowers, PlanetMath.org.
- Listen to Timothy Gowers on The Forum, BBC World Service Radio
- Timothy Gowers's result at International Mathematical Olympiad
|
