Timothy Gowers

Gowers attended King's College School, Cambridge, as a choirboy in the King's College choir, and then Eton College[1] as a King's Scholar, where he was taught mathematics by Norman Routledge.[6] In 1981, Gowers won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score.[7] He completed his PhD, with a dissertation on Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces[8] at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás.[8][3]

After his PhD, Gowers was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College. From 1991 until his return to Cambridge in 1995 he was lecturer at University College London. He was elected to the Rouse Ball Professorship at Cambridge in 1998. During 2000–2 he was visiting professor at Princeton University. In May 2020 it was announced[9] that he would be assuming the title chaire de combinatoire at the College de France beginning in October 2020, though he intends[10] to continue to reside in Cambridge and maintain a part-time affiliation at the university, as well as enjoy the privileges of his life fellowship of Trinity College.

Gowers initially worked on Banach spaces. He used combinatorial tools in proving several of Stefan Banach's conjectures in the subject, in particular constructing a Banach space with almost no symmetry, serving as a counterexample to several other conjectures.[11] With Bernard Maurey he resolved the "unconditional basic sequence problem" in 1992, showing that not every infinite-dimensional Banach space has an infinite-dimensional subspace that admits an unconditional Schauder basis.[12]

After this, Gowers turned to combinatorics and combinatorial number theory. In 1997 he proved[13] that the Szemerédi regularity lemma necessarily comes with tower-type bounds.

In 1998, Gowers proved[14] the first effective bounds for Szemerédi's theorem, showing that any subset ${\displaystyle A\subset \{1,\dots ,N\}}$ free of k-term arithmetic progressions has cardinality ${\displaystyle O(N(\log \log N)^{-c_{k}})}$ for an appropriate ${\displaystyle c_{k}>0}$. One of the ingredients in Gowers's argument is a tool now known as the Balog–Szemerédi–Gowers theorem, which has found many further applications. He also introduced the Gowers norms, a tool in arithmetic combinatorics, and provided the basic techniques for analysing them. This work was further developed by Ben Green and Terence Tao, leading to the Green–Tao theorem.

In 2003, Gowers established a regularity lemma for hypergraphs,[15] analogous to the Szemerédi regularity lemma for graphs.

In 2005, he introduced[16] the notion of a quasirandom group.

More recently, Gowers has worked on Ramsey theory in random graphs and random sets with David Conlon, and has turned his attention[17] to other problems such as the P versus NP problem. He has also developed an interest, in joint work with Mohan Ganesalingam,[18] in automated problem solving.

Gowers has an Erdős number of three.[19]

Timothy Gowers was born on November 20, 1963 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England.[33]

Gowers's father was Patrick Gowers, a composer; his great-grandfather was Sir Ernest Gowers, a British civil servant who was best known for guides to English usage; and his great-great-grandfather was Sir William Gowers, a neurologist. He has two siblings, the writer Rebecca Gowers, and the violinist Katharine Gowers. He has five children[39] and plays jazz piano.[1]

In November 2012, Gowers opted to undergo catheter ablation to treat a sporadic atrial fibrillation, after performing a mathematical risk–benefit analysis to decide whether to have the treatment.[40]

In 1988, Gowers married Emily Thomas, a classicist and Cambridge academic: they divorced in 2007. Together they had three children. In 2008, he married for a second time, to Julie Barrau, a University Lecturer in British Medieval History at the University of Cambridge. They have two children together.[41]

• 1998 Fields Medalist William Timothy Gowers from the American Mathematical Society
• Video lectures by Timothy Gowers on Computational Complexity and Quantum Computation
• Timothy Gowers – Faces of Mathematics
• BBC News (1998): British academics Tim Gowers and Richard Borcherds win top maths awards
• "Multiplying and dividing by whole numbers: Why it is more difficult than you might think", lecture by Timothy Gowers at Gresham College, 22 May 2007 (available for download as video and audio files)
• Körner, Tom (September 1999). "Interview with Tim Gowers (Cambridge)" (PDF). Newsletter of the European Mathematical Society (33): 8–9.
• "William Timothy Gowers". PlanetMath.
• Listen to Timothy Gowers on The Forum, BBC World Service Radio
• Timothy Gowers's results at International Mathematical Olympiad
• 'What can learned societies do to improve scholarly communication?' Audio recording of Sir Timothy Gower's presentation at State Library of Queensland, 29 June 2017