Timothy Gowers
Sir William Timothy Gowers, named Timothy Gowers, ( born November 20, 1963 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, United Kingdom) is a British mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal.
Life and work
Gowers attended King's College School in Cambridge, and Eton College. 1973 to 1976 he sang in the choir of King 's College. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1990 with Bela Bollobás (Symmetric Structures in Banach spaces ). 1989 to 1991 he was a Research Fellow of Trinity College. From 1991 he was also a lecturer and from 1994 Reader at University College London. In 1995 he became a lecturer at Cambridge. Since 1998 he is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 1996 he was awarded the EMS price of the European Mathematical Society and 1998 Fields Medal for his functional analysis (in particular the theory of Banach spaces ) and the combinatorics linking research. In particular, he constructed a Banach space with extremely low symmetry, which serves as a counter example to many conjectures of 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, 2011, the Stefan- Banach Medal.
In 1992, he was with Bernard Maurey that not every infinite dimensional Banach space has an unconditional Schauder basis.
In 1996, he solved the homogeneity problem of Banach (1932 ), which asks whether there are other homogeneous Banach spaces other than the Hilbert space. Gowers showed that this is not so and this is the only one.
In 2001, he gave a new proof ( using methods of Fourier analysis) of the set of Szemeredi on arithmetic progressions of arbitrary length, the existence in subsets of natural numbers of positive density. In 2007 he proved Szemeredi 's regularity lemma for hypergraphs and application as a combinatorial proof of the theorem of Szemeredi in the multidimensional case, first proved by Hillel Furstenberg and Yitzhak Katznelson.
Gowers is committed to a free exchange of academic knowledge and, therefore, founded the Initiative The Cost of Knowledge. In 2012, he called on all scientists to boycott this on the market leader in specialist journals Elsevier ( Holland). His call joined by a number of leading scientists and so he joined a debate in the international scientific community on the Rights of knowledge going on.
In 2012 he received the award from Queen Elizabeth II Knight Bachelor and was thus elevated to the peerage.
He is the son of composer Patrick Gowers, great-grandson of Sir Ernest Gowers (1880-1966), known as the author of books on writing style, and great- great-grandson of Sir William Richard Gowers neurologists. His sister Rebecca Gowers is a journalist and writer, his sister Katharine Gowers violinist. Gowers is married to his second wife and has from the first marriage (since 1988), two sons and a daughter from his second marriage, and (since 2008) a son and a daughter. Gowers plays jazz piano privately.
He was a consultant for the film Proof ( 2005) with Anthony Hopkins and Gwyneth Paltrow.
In 2011 he was awarded the Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America for the issuance and Contributions ( 68 of 288 entries and the introduction come from him ) of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.
His doctoral counts Tom Sanders.
Writings
- Mathematics - a very short introduction, Oxford University Press 2002 ( popular science introduction ) German translation: Mathematics, translated from English by Jürgen Schröder, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-018706-7 Reclam nonfiction