Jean Bourgain

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Jean Bourgain bigraphy, stories - Belgian mathematician and Fields Medalist

Jean Bourgain : biography

28 February 1954 –

Jean Bourgain (born 28 February 1954) is a Belgian mathematician. He has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and, from 1985 until 1995, professor at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette in France, and since 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey., University of St Andrews, Scotland He is currently an editor for the prestigious Annals of Mathematics.

He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1977.

His work is in various areas of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory, partial differential equations, spectral theory and recently also in group theory. He has been recognised by a number of awards, most notably the Fields Medal in 1994.

In 2000 Bourgain connected the Kakeya problem to arithmetic combinatorics.J. Bourgain, Harmonic analysis and combinatorics: How much may they contribute to each other?, Mathematics: Frontiers and Perspectives, IMU/Amer. Math. Soc., 2000, pp. 13–32.

In 2009 Bourgain was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences., press release on 12 February 2009

In 2010 he received the Shaw Prize in Mathematics.

In 2012 he and Terence Tao received the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. on 19 January 2012