Richard Borcherds

Early life and education

Borcherds was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old.

Borcherds was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. As a student, Borcherds won a gold medal, silver medal, and special prize in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He attended university at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway.

Career

After receiving his doctorate in 1985, Borcherds has held various alternating positions at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, serving as Morrey Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Berkeley from 1987 to 1988. He was a Royal Society University Research Fellow. From 1996 he held a Royal Society Research Professorship at Cambridge before returning to Berkeley in 1999 as Professor of Mathematics.

Mathematical work

He did notable work on the Monstrous moonshine theory.

He introduced vertex algebras.

Autism

An interview with Simon Singh for The Guardian, in which Borcherds suggested he might have some sort of traits possibly associated with Asperger syndrome, led to a chapter about him in a book on autism by Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen insinuated that while Borcherds may have had autistic traits, he did not meet a formal diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.

Awards and honours

In 1992 Borcherds was one of the first recipients of the EMS prizes awarded at the first European Congress of Mathematics in Paris, and in 1994 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich. In 1994, he was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1998 at the 23rd International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin, Germany he received the Fields Medal together with Maxim Kontsevich, William Timothy Gowers and Curtis T. McMullen. The award cited him "for his contributions to algebra, the theory of automorphic forms, and mathematical physics, including the introduction of vertex algebras and Borcherds' Lie algebras, the proof of the Conway-Norton moonshine conjecture and the discovery of a new class of automorphic infinite products." In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

References

References

1. "BORCHERDS, Prof. Richard Ewen". Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press.
2. (1998). "The work of Richard Ewen Borcherds". Documenta Mathematica.
3. {{MathGenealogy
4. "Richard Borcherds".
5. James Lepowsky, [https://www.ams.org/notices/199901/fields.pdf "The Work of Richard Borcherds"], ''Notices of the American Mathematical Society'', Volume 46, Number 1 (January 1999).
6. Borcherds, Richard E.. (1998). "Doc. Math. (Bielefeld) Extra Vol. ICM Berlin, 1998, vol. I".
7. "International Mathematical Olympiad".
8. (19 August 1998). "UC Berkeley professor wins highest honor in mathematics, the prestigious Fields Medal". University of California, Berkeley.
9. Jackson, Allyn. (November 1998). "Borcherds, Gowers, Kontsevich, and McMullen Receive Fields Medals". American Mathematical Society.
10. (2000). "URFs become FRS: Frances Ashcroft, Athene Donald, and John Pethica". [[Royal Society]].
11. Simon Singh, [http://simonsingh.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/interview-with-richard-borcherds/ "Interview with Richard Borcherds"], ''The Guardian'' (28 August 1998)
12. Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2004). "The Essential Difference: Male and Female Brains and the Truth about Autism". Basic Books.
13. [https://www.theguardian.com/Archive/Article/0,4273,4103969,00.html High flying obsessives], ''The Guardian'', December 2000
14. "EC/1994/05: Borcherds, Richard Ewen". The Royal Society.
15. Borcherds, Richard E.. (1992). "Monstrous moonshine and monstrous Lie superalgebras". Springer Science and Business Media LLC.
16. [https://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society]. Retrieved 10 November 2012.
17. [http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/april-29-2014-NAS-Election.html National Academy of Sciences Members and Foreign Associates Elected] {{webarchive. link. (18 August 2015 , [[National Academy of Sciences]], 29 April 2014.)