Person: Bourgain, Jean
Jean Bourgain was a Belgian mathematician who worked on mathematical analysis and its application to partial differential equations, mathematical physics, combinatorics, number theory, ergodic theory and theoretical computer science.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- This was awarded in 1979 and Bourgain received the Alumni Prize from the Belgium NSF.
- When his Research Fellowship ended in 1981, Bourgain was appointed a professor at the Free University of Brussels.
- In 1985 Bourgain was awarded the highest science honour from Belgium, the Damry-Deleeuw-Bourlart Prize.
- Also in 1985 Bourgain left Belgium and accepted two appointments, one as J L Doob Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois in the United States and the other as Professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique at Bures-sur-Yvette in France.
- The French Academy of Sciences awarded Bourgain its Langevin Prize in 1985 and its highest award, the E Cartan Prize in 1990.
- Bourgain has made outstanding contributions across a whole range of topics in analysis.
- At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich in 1994, Bourgain received his greatest honour for this work when he was awarded a Fields Medal.
- In his work on Banach spaces, Bourgain has studied problems examining how large a section of a finite dimensional Banach space can look like a Hilbert subspace.
- Bourgain's work on ergodic theory has been extremely innovative, setting up a new theory examining averages under families of polynomial iterations.
- Another important contribution was Bourgain's result for the circle maximal function.
- In 1995 Bourgain left his appointment at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifique, having been appointed to the Institute for Advance Study at Princeton in 1994.
- Bourgain has already been awarded a number of honorary degrees and awards in addition to those mentioned above, and clearly many further honours will be bestowed on him in the years ahead.
- In addition to the honours mentioned above, Bourgain was elected to the Academy of Sciences in Paris (2000), the Polish Academy of Sciences (2000) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2009).
- We have described many wonderful contributions to mathematics by Bourgain but we have not yet mentioned his editorial work.
Born 28 February 1954, Ostend, Belgium. Died 22 December 2018, Bonheiden, Belgium.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Origin Belgium, Prize Shaw
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
