Person: Gowers, William Timothy
Timothy Gowers won a Fields medal for his important contributions to functional analysis.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Patrick Gowers is a composer, famous for composing the music for many films and also known for his works for the guitar.
- Rebecca Gowers is a freelance journalist and author.
- Tim Gowers was sent to King's College School, Cambridge where he was a boarder as his parents were living in London at the time.
- After completing his school education at Eton, Gowers matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge.
- In 1990 Gowers was awarded his doctorate for his thesis Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces written with Béla Bollobás as his thesis advisor.
- Dr Gowers' achievements include the following: a solution to the notorious Banach hyperplane problem (to find a Banach space which is not isomorphic to any hyperplane), a counterexample to the Banach space Schröder-Bernstein theorem, a proof that if all closed infinite-dimensional subspaces of a Banach space are isomorphic then it is a Hilbert space, and an example of a Banach space such that every bounded operator is a Fredholm operator.
- Over the past five years, Gowers has made the geometry of Banach spaces look completely different.
- In 1995 Gowers was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge.
- At the European Congress, Gowers lectured on Banach spaces with few operators.
- These two fields apparently have little to do with each other, and a significant achievement of Gowers has been to combine these fruitfully.
- In 1998 Gowers was named Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
- Another highly significant recent paper by Gowers is Quasirandom groups (2008) but we will mention several important works by Gowers which are major contributions to mathematics in addition to his amazing research contributions.
- Let us end this biography with giving some details of two further innovative projects in which Gowers has been involved.
- The first of these is the book The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008) with Gowers as editor, and June Barrow-Green and Imre Leader as associate editors.
- The project has been very successful although perhaps fewer mathematicians took part than Gowers had hoped.
- Gowers was Knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours List 2012.
- On 16 June 2012 it was announced that the Knighthood was to Professor William Timothy Gowers, FRS, Royal Society Research Professor, Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Cambridge: For services to Mathematics.
Born 20 November 1963, Marlborough, Wiltshire, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Origin England
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References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
