Keith Martin Ball facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Keith Ball
FRS FRSE
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Ball in 2009
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Keith Martin Ball
26 December 1960 New York City
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| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
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| Thesis | Isometric problems in lp̲ and sections of convex sets (1986) |
| Doctoral advisor | Béla Bollobás |
Keith Martin Ball (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.
Education
Ball was educated at Berkhamsted School and Trinity College, Cambridge 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.
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.
Awards and honours
Ball was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 2012 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. His Royal Society 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 50s, 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. ... "
In 2023, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea.
