| Timothy Gowers | |
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Timothy Gowers in 2009
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| Born | 20 November 1963 Wiltshire, England |
| Citizenship | British |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge University College London |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | Béla Bollobás |
| Doctoral students | Pablo Candela David Conlon Ben J. Green George Petridis Tom Sanders Mark Walters Julia Wolf András Zsák |
| Known for | Functional analysis, combinatorics |
| Notable awards | Prize of the European Mathematical Society (1996) Fields Medal (1998) |
William Timothy Gowers FRS (born 20 November 1963, Wiltshire) is a British mathematician. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at Cambridge University, where he also holds the Rouse Ball chair, and is a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1998 he received the Fields Medal for his research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.
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His early education was at King's College School, Cambridge as a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and at Eton College[1] where he was a King's Scholar. He completed his PhD entitled 'Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces' at the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in 1990 under the supervision of Béla Bollobás.
From 1991 to 1995 he was a member of the Department of Mathematics at University College London. In 1996 he received the Prize of the European Mathematical Society and in 1998 the Fields Medal for research on functional analysis and combinatorics. He used combinatorial tools in proving several of Stefan Banach's conjectures on Banach spaces and in constructing a Banach space with almost no symmetry, serving as a counterexample to several other conjectures.[2] With Bernard Maurey he resolved the "unconditional basic sequence problem" in 1992, showing that not every infinite-dimensional Banach space has an infinite-dimensional subspace that admits an unconditional Schauder basis. Another work which has proved highly influential is his proof of Szemerédi's theorem by Fourier-analytic methods. He has also made substantial contributions in combinatorics, particularly to the study of regularity for graphs and hypergraphs. In 1999 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.
In addition to scholarly papers on mathematics, Gowers is also the author of several works popularizing mathematics, including the 2002 book Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction[3] which describes modern research mathematics to the layman. He was consulted about the 2005 film Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins. Recently, he has been the editor for The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, a voluminous book published in 2008 that introduces and traces the development of various branches and concepts of modern mathematics. For his work on the Princeton Companion, Gowers won the 2011 Euler Book Prize of the Mathematical Association of America.[4]
In a 2009 post on his blog, Gowers asked the provocative question "is massively collaborative mathematics possible?".[5] This post led to his creation of the Polymath Project, using the comment functionality of his blog to produce mathematics collaboratively.[6]
The initial proposed problem for this project, now called Polymath1 by the Polymath community, was to find a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem. As the project took form, two main threads of discourse emerged. The first thread, which was carried out in the comments of Gowers's blog, would continue with the original goal of finding a combinatorial proof. The second thread, which was carried out in the comments of Terry Tao's blog, focused on calculating bounds on density Hales-Jewett numbers and Moser numbers for low dimensions.
After 7 weeks, Gowers announced on his blog that the problem was "probably solved",[7] though work would continue on both Gowers's thread and Tao's thread well into May 2009, some three months after the initial announcement. In total over 40 people contributed to the Polymath1 project. Both threads of the Polymath1 project have been successful, producing at least two new papers to be published under the pseudonym D.H.J Polymath.[8][9][10]
The success of the Polymath1 project has spawned additional Polymath projects. To date there are 5 official Polymath Projects, and 2 Mini-Polymath Projects. More information on the Polymath1 project can be found on the project wiki. Jason Dyer's A gentle introduction to the Polymath project provides a good explanation of the work of the project for a non-mathematical audience.
Tricki.org is a Wikipedia-style project collecting methods of mathematical problem solving conceived in 2008 and launched by Gowers, Olof Sisask and Alex Frolkin in March 2009.[11] Terence Tao and Ben Green are among those to have contributed articles.[12]
He is the son of composer Patrick Gowers, great-grandson of British civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers and great-great-grandson of neurologist Sir William Gowers. He has five children[13] and plays jazz piano.[1] For ten days of every November, Gowers and his five children all have either only odd or only even number ages.