Jean Bourgain


Jean, Baron Bourgain was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics.

Biography

Bourgain received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1977. He was 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, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1994 until 2018. He was an editor for the Annals of Mathematics. From 2012–2014, he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.
His research work included several areas of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory, partial differential equations and spectral theory, and later also group theory. In 2000, Bourgain connected the Kakeya problem to arithmetic combinatorics.

Awards and Recognition

Bourgain received several awards during his career, the most notable being the Fields Medal in 1994.
In 2009 Bourgain was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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.
In 2015, he was made a baron by king Philippe of Belgium.
In 2016, he received the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
In 2017, he received the 2018 Leroy P. Steele Prizes.