Timothy Gowers

Sir William Timothy Gowers is a British mathematician, born on 20 November 1963, who received the Fields Medal in 1998 for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics. He won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score in 1981 and completed his PhD, with a dissertation on symmetric structures in Banach spaces, at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás. He constructed a Banach space with almost no symmetry and with Bernard Maurey resolved the unconditional basic sequence problem, then turned to combinatorics, proving the first effective bounds for Szemerédi's theorem and introducing the Gowers norms. He holds the combinatorics chair at the Collège de France and is a research professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Trinity College.