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The Department of Mathematical Sciences is delighted to welcome Professor Timothy Gowers to deliver the 2024 Terry Wall Lecture, which will take place on the 20th of March at 4:15pm in the Rotblat lecture theatre (Chadwick building).
Coffee and tea will be available in the foyer outside the lecture theatre starting at 3:45pm. Nibbles will be served after the lecture.
Professor Timothy Gowers talk is entitled “The hidden structure of sumsets”.
Abstract: Let A be a finite set of integers (or more generally a set of elements of some Abelian group). The sumset A + A consists of all integers that can be written as a + b, where a and b are elements of A. This very simple definition leads quickly to a wealth of interesting problems, some now solved, and others still wide open.
For any queries concerning the lecture, please contact Alice Rizzardo alice.rizzardo@liverpool.ac.uk.
No registration is needed if you would like to attend in person; to view the lecture online please register here.
About the speaker
Timothy Gowers is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He received his PhD in 1990 from the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. He started his career working in functional analysis, where he proved several fundamental results on the properties of Banach spaces by introducing a groundbreaking approach based on combinatorial methods. His results also paved the way for a large number of major further advances in this field. He went on to prove more striking results in combinatorics and combinatorial number theory, in particular studying randomness and quasi-randomness.
He was awarded the Fields medal in 1998 at the age of 34. He has received many other honours and accolades, including the Prize of the European Mathematical Society in 1996, the De Morgan Medal in 2016 and the Sylvester Medal also in 2016. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999 and was knighted in 2012.
He has also been celebrated for his outreach efforts. He has written the book Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and edited The Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), a book providing insiders’ overviews of many of the modern branches of mathematics, and their influence and applications to music, biology, and more.
"The curious switch, from initially perceiving an obstruction to a problem to eventually embodying this obstruction as a number or an algebraic object of some sort that we can effectively study, is repeated over and over again, in different contexts, throughout mathematics."
― Timothy Gowers, The Princeton Companion to Mathematics
About the Terry Wall Lecture
The Terry Wall Lecture is an annual lecture on a topic in Pure Mathematics (broadly construed) by an internationally distinguished speaker. The lecture is named in honour of Professor Terry Wall FRS, Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Liverpool from 1965 until his retirement in 1999. During this time he served terms as Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics and as President of the London Mathematical Society. His research has been recognised by a number of prestigious awards and honours, including the Senior Whitehead Prize and the Pólya Prize of the LMS, the Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society, and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Terry Wall FRS