Keith Martin Ball

Last updated

Keith Ball
Ball Keith.jpg
Ball in 2009
Born
Keith Martin Ball

(1960-12-26) 26 December 1960 (age 63) [1]
New York City [1]
Alma mater Trinity College, Cambridge
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
Thesis Isometric problems in lp̲ and sections of convex sets  (1986)
Doctoral advisor Béla Bollobás [3]
Website

Keith Martin Ball (born 26 December 1960) is a mathematician and professor at the University of Warwick. He was scientific director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) from 2010 to 2014. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Contents

Education

Ball was educated at Berkhamsted School [1] and Trinity College, Cambridge [1] where he studied the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1982 and a PhD in 1987 for research supervised by Béla Bollobás. [9]

Research

Keith Ball's research is in the fields of functional analysis, high-dimensional and discrete geometry and information theory. He is the author of Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations. [10]

Awards and honours

Ball was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 2012 [11] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. His Royal Society citation reads

Keith Ball is an exceptionally original mathematician whose work has had a major influence on two branches of mathematics: functional analysis and information theory. He proved the first extension theorems for Lipschitz functions not reducible to one-point extensions and solved the reverse isoperimetric problem. He produced a sharp version of the Banach-Steinhaus Theorem conjectured in the 50s, and proved that infinitely many values of the Riemann function at odd integers are irrational (with Rivoal). (With Artstein, Barthe and Naor) he answered a fundamental question in information theory by showing that the central limit theorem of probability is driven by an analogue of the second law of thermodynamics. Since 2010 Ball has served as Scientific Director of ICMS in Edinburgh. He also successfully popularises science, for example in his book "Strange curves. ... " [12]

In 2023, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. [13]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Wiles</span> British mathematician who proved Fermats Last Theorem

Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy Gowers</span> British mathematician

Sir William Timothy Gowers, is a British mathematician. He is Professeur titulaire of the Combinatorics chair at the Collège de France, and director of research at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998, he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Béla Bollobás</span> Hungarian mathematician

Béla Bollobás FRS is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul Erdős from the age of 14.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Donaldson</span> English mathematician

Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nigel Hitchin</span> British mathematician

Nigel James Hitchin FRS is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, gauge theory, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Green (mathematician)</span> British mathematician (born 1977)

Ben Joseph Green FRS is a British mathematician, specialising in combinatorics and number theory. He is the Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Masser</span>

David William Masser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Basel. He is known for his work in transcendental number theory, Diophantine approximation, and Diophantine geometry. With Joseph Oesterlé in 1985, Masser formulated the abc conjecture, which has been called "the most important unsolved problem in Diophantine analysis".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dusa McDuff</span> English mathematician

Dusa McDuff FRS CorrFRSE is an English mathematician who works on symplectic geometry. She was the first recipient of the Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics, was a Noether Lecturer, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She is currently the Helen Lyttle Kimmel '42 Professor of Mathematics at Barnard College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian G. Macdonald</span> British mathematician (1928–2023)

Ian Grant Macdonald was a British mathematician known for his contributions to symmetric functions, special functions, Lie algebra theory and other aspects of algebra, algebraic combinatorics, and combinatorics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bryan John Birch</span> British mathematician (born 1931)

Bryan John Birch FRS is a British mathematician. His name has been given to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vitali Milman</span>

Vitali Davidovich Milman is a mathematician specializing in analysis. He is a professor at the Tel Aviv University. In the past he was a President of the Israel Mathematical Union and a member of the “Aliyah” committee of Tel Aviv University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graeme Segal</span> Australian mathematician

Graeme Bryce Segal FRS is an Australian mathematician, and professor at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chandrashekhar Khare</span> Indian mathematician (born 1968)

Chandrashekhar B. Khare, is a professor of mathematics at the University of California Los Angeles. In 2005, he made a major advance in the field of Galois representations and number theory by proving the level 1 Serre conjecture, and later a proof of the full conjecture with Jean-Pierre Wintenberger. He has been on the Mathematical Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize from 2015, serving as Jury Chair from 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Gavin Hall</span> Australian statistician (1951–2016)

Peter Gavin Hall was an Australian researcher in probability theory and mathematical statistics. The American Statistical Association described him as one of the most influential and prolific theoretical statisticians in the history of the field. The School of Mathematics and Statistics Building at The University of Melbourne was renamed the Peter Hall building in his honour on 9 December 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Baker (mathematician)</span> English mathematician (1939–2018)

Alan Baker was an English mathematician, known for his work on effective methods in number theory, in particular those arising from transcendental number theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mladen Bestvina</span> Croatian-American mathematician

Mladen Bestvina is a Croatian-American mathematician working in the area of geometric group theory. He is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Utah.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Hairer</span> Austrian-British mathematician

Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian-British mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at EPFL and at Imperial College London. He previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. In 2014 he was awarded the Fields Medal, one of the highest honours a mathematician can achieve. In 2020 he won the 2021 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Wise (mathematician)</span> American mathematician (born 1971)

Daniel T. Wise is an American mathematician who specializes in geometric group theory and 3-manifolds. He is a professor of mathematics at McGill University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franck Barthe</span> French mathematician

Franck Barthe is a French mathematician. He was awarded the European Congress of Mathematics (ECM) prize in 2004. He is working as a professor of mathematics at Paul Sabatier University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shiri Artstein</span> Israeli mathematician and professor

Shiri Artstein-Avidan is an Israeli mathematician who in 2015 won the Erdős Prize. She specializes in convex geometry and asymptotic geometric analysis, and is a professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "BALL, Prof. Keith Martin" . Who's Who 2014, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2014; online edn, Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 14 February 2022. Retrieved 20 February 2014.
  2. "Professor Keith Martin Ball FRS FRSE". Royal Society of Edinburgh . Archived from the original on 14 February 2022. Retrieved 14 February 2022.
  3. Keith Martin Ball at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. Keith Martin Ball's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  5. Ball, K.; Carlen, E. A.; Lieb, E. H. (1994). "Sharp uniform convexity and smoothness inequalities for trace norms". Inventiones Mathematicae. 115: 463–482. Bibcode:1994InMat.115..463B. doi:10.1007/BF01231769. S2CID   189831705.
  6. Ball, K. (1992). "Markov chains, Riesz transforms and Lipschitz maps". Geometric and Functional Analysis. 2 (2): 137–172. doi:10.1007/BF01896971. S2CID   121182780.
  7. Artstein, S.; Ball, K. M.; Barthe, F.; Naor, A. (2004). "Solution of Shannon's problem on the monotonicity of entropy" (PDF). Journal of the American Mathematical Society. 17 (4): 975. doi: 10.1090/S0894-0347-04-00459-X .
  8. Keith Martin Ball publications indexed by Microsoft Academic
  9. Ball, Keith Martin (1986). Isometric problems in lp̲ and sections of convex sets (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 26 February 2014. Retrieved 20 February 2014.
  10. Ball, Keith (2006). Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations. Princeton University Press. ISBN   0691127972. Archived from the original on 20 April 2015. Retrieved 27 April 2015.
  11. "List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society". American Mathematical Society . Archived from the original on 20 May 2019. Retrieved 7 May 2015.
  12. "Professor Keith Ball FRS". London: Royal Society.
  13. "Keith Ball". Member. Academia Europaea. Retrieved 27 October 2024.