Richard Borcherds

Richard Ewen Borcherds is a British mathematician, born in Cape Town, South Africa, on 29 November 1959, currently working in quantum field theory and known for his work in lattices, group theory and infinite-dimensional algebras, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998. He is well known for his proof of monstrous moonshine using ideas from string theory and introduced vertex algebras. Educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham, he won a gold medal, a silver medal and a special prize at the International Mathematical Olympiad and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway and received his doctorate in 1985. He has held positions at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, was a Royal Society University Research Fellow, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1994.