William Timothy Gowers

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Sir William Timothy Gowers , called Timothy Gowers, (born November 20, 1963 in Marlborough , Wiltshire , United Kingdom ) is a British mathematician and recipient of the Fields Medal .

Timothy Gowers, Berlin 2011

life and work

Gowers attended Kings College School at Cambridge and Eton College . From 1973 to 1976 he sang in the King's College choir. He studied at Trinity College in Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1990 under Béla Bollobás ( Symmetric Structures in Banach spaces ). From 1989 to 1991 he was a Research Fellow at Trinity College. From 1991 he was simultaneously a lecturer and from 1994 a reader at University College London . In 1995 he became a lecturer in Cambridge. He has been Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University since 1998 and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge .

In 1996 he received the EMS Prize of the European Mathematical Society and in 1998 the Fields Medal for his research that combines functional analysis (especially the theory of Banach spaces ) and combinatorics . In particular, he constructed a Banach space with extremely low symmetry, which serves as a counterexample for many conjectures in functional analysis. In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society . In 1994 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich (Recent results in the theory of infinite dimensional Banach spaces). In 1995 he received the Junior Whitehead Prize and in 2011 the Stefan Banach Medal . In 2015 Gowers was elected to the Academia Europaea . For 2016 he was awarded the De Morgan Medal and the Sylvester Medal .

In 1992 he and Bernard Maurey showed that not every infinite-dimensional Banach space has an unconditional basis sequence .

Gowers in Heidelberg 2014

In 1996 he solved the homogeneity problem of Banach (1932), which asks whether there are other homogeneous Banach spaces besides the Hilbert space . Gowers showed that this is not the case and this is the only one.

In 2001 he gave a new proof (using methods of Fourier analysis ) of Szemeredi's theorem about the existence of arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions in subsets of natural numbers of positive density. In 2007 he proved Szemeredi's regularity lemma for hypergraphs and, as an application, a combinatorial proof of Szemeredi's theorem in the multidimensional case, first proved by Hillel Fürstenberg and Yitzhak Katznelson .

Gowers is committed to the free exchange of academic knowledge and therefore founded the initiative The Cost of Knowledge . In 2012 he called on all scientists to boycott Elsevier (Holland), the market leader for specialist journals . A number of leading scholars joined his call and it sparked a debate in the international scientific community about the rights to knowledge.

On his blog, he also started the Polymath Project in 2009, which looked for evidence on selected problems with open participation. Gowers was also one of the initiators of a website that collects problem-solving strategies and mathematical tricks in Wikipedia style ( tricki.org ). Among others, Terence Tao and Ben Green contributed.

In 2012, he received the Knight Bachelor award from Queen Elizabeth II and was thus raised to the nobility .

He is the son of the composer Patrick Gowers , great-grandson of the British Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966), known as the author of books on written style, and the great-great-grandson of the neurologist Sir William Richard Gowers . His sister Rebecca Gowers is a journalist and writer, his sister Katharine Gowers a violinist. Gowers is married for the second time and has two sons and a daughter from the first marriage (since 1988) and a son and a daughter from the second marriage (since 2008). Gowers plays jazz piano privately.

He was a consultant for the film Proof (2005) with Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow .

In 2011, he received the Mathematical Association of America's Euler Book Prize for editing and contributions (he wrote 68 of the 288 entries and the introduction) to the Princeton Companion to Mathematics .

Tom Sanders is one of his PhD students .

Fonts

  • Mathematics - a very short introduction , Oxford University Press 2002 (popular science introduction)
    • German translation: Mathematics , translated from English by Jürgen Schröder, Stuttgart 2011, Reclam non-fiction book ISBN 978-3-15-018706-7
  • Editor with June Barrow-Green , Imre Leader : The Princeton Companion to Mathematics , Princeton University Press 2008 (introductory encyclopedia)
  • Probabilistic combinatorics and the recent work of Peter Keevash, Bulletin AMS 2016, online
  • Generalizations of Fourier analysis, and how to apply them, Bulletin AMS 2016, Online

Web links

Commons : William Timothy Gowers  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Membership directory: Timothy Gowers. Academia Europaea, accessed November 9, 2017 .
  2. ^ Gowers, Maurey, The unconditional basic sequence problem , Preprint
  3. ↑ that is, isomorphic to all of its infinite-dimensional subspaces
  4. ↑ Gowers A new dichotomy for Banach spaces , Geometry and Functional Analysis, Volume 6, 1996, pp. 1083-1093
  5. ^ Gowers A new proof of Szemeredis Theorem , Geom. Funct. Anal. Volume 11, 2001, pp. 465-588
  6. ^ Gower's Hypergraph regularity and the multidimensional Szemeredi Theorem , Annals of Mathematics, Volume 166, 2007, pp. 897-946, online
  7. ↑ Polymath Project by Michael Nielsen . Gowers, Nielsen Massively collaborative mathematics , Nature, Volume 461, 2009, pp. 879-881. Gowers Is massively collaborative mathematics possible? , Gowers blog, 2009
  8. ↑ Tricki.org


personal data
SURNAME Gowers, William Timothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gowers, Timothy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH November 20, 1963
PLACE OF BIRTH Wiltshire , UK