Greg Hjorth


Greg Hjorth was an Australian Professor of Mathematics, chess International Master and joint Commonwealth Champion in 1983. He worked in the field of mathematical logic.

Chess career

Hjorth came second in the 1980 Australian Chess Championship, at the age of 16. He won the Doeberl Cup in Canberra in 1982, 1985 and 1987, and played for Australia in the Chess Olympiads of 1982, 1984 and 1986.
According to Chessmetrics, his best single performance was at the 1984 British Chess Championship, where he scored 4/7 against 2551-rated opposition, for a performance rating of 2570.
Hjorth retired from most chess in the 1980s.

Mathematical career

Hjorth earned his Ph.D. in 1993, under the direction of W. Hugh Woodin, with a dissertation entitled On the influence of second uniform indiscernible. He held faculty positions at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Melbourne. Among his most important contributions to set theory was the so-called theory of turbulence, used in the theory of Borel equivalence relations. In 1998 he was an Invited Speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.

Death

Hjorth died of a heart attack in Melbourne, on 13 January 2011.

Book