Vaughan Jones

Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones, KNZM ( born December 31, 1952 in Gisborne, New Zealand) is a professor of mathematics at Berkeley 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 Cambridge / New Zealand and Auckland to school and in 1970 went with a scholarship to the University of Auckland. In 1973, he earned his Master of Science degree with honors and was awarded a scholarship by the Swiss government to study at the University of Geneva from 1974 theoretical physics. But in 1976 he moved entirely to mathematics and was awarded his doctorate in 1979 at A. Haefliger. 1980/81 he was a professor at the University of Los Angeles, 1981, he went to the University of Pennsylvania and 1985 at the University of Berkeley in California.

Jones worked on von Neumann algebras, ie, operator algebras, and discovered during this work, a new - and experts surprising - knot invariant: the Jones polynomial. Jones also worked on precise models of statistical mechanics.

In 1990 he received the Fields Medal, which he also gave a plenary lecture at the ICM in Kyoto ( 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 ). In 1990 he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.