Kenneth Falconer

Kenneth John Falconer is a British mathematician, born on 25 January 1952, who works in mathematical analysis and in particular on fractal geometry. He is Regius Professor of Mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of St Andrews. He is known for his work on sets and measures arising from iterated function systems, especially self-similar and self-affine sets, and for his research on Hausdorff and other fractal dimensions. He formulated Falconer conjecture on the dimension of distance sets, conceived the notion of a digital sundial, and in combinatorial geometry established a lower bound of 5 for the chromatic number of the plane in the Lebesgue measurable case. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, completed his PhD in 1979 under Hallard Croft, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1998.