Vaughan FR Jones

Vaughan Jones

Sir Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones , KNZM (born December 31, 1952 in Gisborne , New Zealand , † September 6, 2020 ) was Professor of Mathematics at Vanderbilt University . He won the Fields Medal in 1990 for his work on new knot invariants.

Life

Jones grew up in New Zealand, where he went to school in Cambridge / New Zealand and Auckland , and in 1970 he attended the University of Auckland on a scholarship . In 1973 he received his Master of Science with top marks and received a grant from the Swiss government to study theoretical physics at the University of Geneva from 1974. In 1976 he switched to mathematics and received his doctorate under A. Haefliger in 1979 . In 1980/81 he was Assistant Professor at the University of Los Angeles, in 1981 he went to the University of Pennsylvania , 1985 to the University of California, Berkeley in California and in 2011 to theVanderbilt University . In 1983 he became a research fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ( Sloan Research Fellow ).

Jones worked on Von Neumann algebras , i.e. operator algebras, and discovered a new knot invariant - the Jones polynomial - which also surprised experts . Jones also worked on exact models of statistical mechanics.

In 1990 he received the Fields Medal, while also having a plenary lecture at the ICM in Kyoto held (Von Neumann Algebras in Mathematics and Physics) . In 1986 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berkeley (Subfactors of type factors and related topics) ${\displaystyle II_{1}}$ . In 1990 he also became a Fellow of the Royal Society . He was a fellow of the American Mathematical Society , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (from 1993) and the Royal Society of New Zealand (from 1991) as well as a member of the Australian Academy of Sciences (from 1992), the National Academy of Sciences (from 1999 ) and the Royal Norwegian Scientific Society (from 2001).

literature

• Joan S. Birman : The Work of Vaughan FR Jones. In: Ichirō Satake (ed.): Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, August 21-29, 1990, Kyōto, Japan. Springer, 1991 (English; laudation for Fields Medal 1990; online )

Fonts (selection)

• Index for subfactors. Invent. Math. 72 (1983), No. 1, 1-25.
• with A. Connes : Property T for von Neumann algebras. Bull. London Math. Soc. 17, No. 1, 57-62 (1985).
• A polynomial invariant for knots via von Neumann algebras. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. (NS) 12 (1985), No. 1, 103-111.
• Hecke algebra representations of braid groups and link polynomials. Ann. of Math. (2) 126 (1987), No. 2, 335-388.
• On knot invariants related to some statistical mechanical models. Pacific J. Math. 137 (1989), no. 2, 311-334.
• with F. Goodman, P. de la Harpe : Coxeter graphs and towers of algebras (= Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Publications, 14). Springer-Verlag, New York, 1989, ISBN 0-387-96979-9 .
• with V. Sunder: Introduction to subfactors (= London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, 234). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, ISBN 0-521-58420-5 .

Web links

• John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Vaughan FR Jones. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
• Vaughan FR Jones. In: math.berkeley.edu. February 12, 2018(English, homepage). 
• Vaughan Jones. Vanderbilt University, Department of Mathematics, July 2, 2018(English). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Vaughan FR Jones in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)