Richard Borcherds facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Richard Borcherds
|
|
|---|---|
Borcherds in 1993
|
|
| Born |
Richard Ewen Borcherds
29 November 1959 Cape Town, South Africa
|
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Known for | Borcherds algebra |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | The leech lattice and other lattices (1984) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Horton Conway |
| Doctoral students | Daniel Allcock |
Richard Ewen Borcherds is a famous British mathematician. He was born on November 29, 1959. He is known for his amazing work in different areas of mathematics. These include lattices, group theory, and algebras.
In 1998, he won the prestigious Fields Medal. This award is like the Nobel Prize for mathematics. He is also famous for proving something called monstrous moonshine. He used ideas from string theory to do this.
Contents
Early Life
Richard Borcherds was born in Cape Town, South Africa. This was in 1959. When he was just six months old, his family moved. They went to Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
Education
Richard Borcherds went to King Edward's School, Birmingham. After that, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. There, he learned from a very important mathematician. His teacher was John Horton Conway.
Career
Richard Borcherds earned his doctorate degree in 1985. After that, he worked at two major universities. He held positions at University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a professor of mathematics at Berkeley.
Richard Borcherds is known for his unique way of thinking. This special way of looking at problems helps him solve very complex math puzzles.
Awards and Honours
Richard Borcherds has received many important awards. In 1992, he won an EMS Prize. This was at the first European Congress of Mathematics.
In 1994, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. This is a very high honour for scientists in the UK. He was also an invited speaker at a big math meeting in Zurich.
The biggest award he received was the Fields Medal in 1998. He shared this award with three other mathematicians. The award recognized his important contributions to algebra. It also praised his work on automorphic forms and mathematical physics. He introduced new types of algebras. He also proved the Conway-Norton moonshine conjecture.
In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Two years later, in 2014, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
