Keith Martin Ball

For the footballer, see Keith Ball.
Keith Ball
Born Keith Martin Ball
December 26, 1960[1]
New York[1]
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater Trinity College, Cambridge
Thesis Isometric problems in lp̲ and sections of convex sets (1986)
Doctoral advisor Béla Bollobás[2]
Doctoral students Gergely Ambrus[2]
Notable awards

Website

Keith Martin Ball FRS[4] FRSE[3] (born 26 December 1960) is a mathematician and professor at the University of Warwick. He was scientific director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) from 2010 to 2014.[5][6][6][7][8][9]

Education

Ball was educated at Berkhamsted School[1] and Trinity College, Cambridge[1] where he studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics in 1982 and a PhD in 1987 for research supervised by Béla Bollobás.[10]

Research

Keith Ball's research is in the fields of Functional Analysis, High-dimensional and Discrete Geometry and Information Theory. He is the author of Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations.[11]

Awards and honours

Ball was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2013. His citation reads

“ Keith Ball is an exceptionally original mathematician whose work has had a major influence on two branches of mathematics: functional analysis and information theory. He proved the first extension theorems for Lipschitz functions not reducible to one-point extensions and solved the reverse isoperimetric problem. He produced a sharp version of the Banach-Steinhaus Theorem conjectured in the 50’s, and proved that infinitely many values of the Riemann function at odd integers are irrational (with Rivoal). (With Artstein, Barthe and Naor) he answered a fundamental question in information theory by showing that the central limit theorem of probability is driven by an analogue of the second law of thermodynamics. Since 2010 Ball has served as Scientific Director of ICMS in Edinburgh. He also successfully popularises science, for example in his book "Strange curves…."[4] ”

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "BALL, Prof. Keith Martin". Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Keith Martin Ball at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/cms/files/fellows/lists/fellows.pdf
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Professor Keith Ball FRS". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2014-02-20.
  5. ↑ Keith Martin Ball's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Ball, K.; Carlen, E. A.; Lieb, E. H. (1994). "Sharp uniform convexity and smoothness inequalities for trace norms". Inventiones Mathematicae 115: 463. doi:10.1007/BF01231769.
  7. ↑ Ball, K. (1992). "Markov chains, Riesz transforms and Lipschitz maps". Geometric and Functional Analysis 2 (2): 137. doi:10.1007/BF01896971.
  8. ↑ Artstein, S.; Ball, K. M.; Barthe, F.; Naor, A. (2004). "Solution of Shannon's problem on the monotonicity of entropy". Journal of the American Mathematical Society 17 (4): 975. doi:10.1090/S0894-0347-04-00459-X.
  9. ↑ List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
  10. ↑ Ball, Keith Martin (1986). Isometric problems in lp̲ and sections of convex sets (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
  11. ↑ Ball, Keith (2006). Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691127972.