Alex Wilkie

Who is Alex Wilkie?

Alex James Wilkie FRS is a British mathematician known for his contributions to Model theory and logic. Previously Reader in Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford, he was appointed to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester in 2007.

Alex Wilkie attended Aylesbury Grammar School and went on to gain his BSc in mathematics with first class honours from University College London in 1969, his MSc from the University of London in 1970, and his PhD from the Bedford College, University of London in 1973 under the supervision of Wilfrid Hodges with a dissertation entitled Models of Number Theory. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. To quote the citation

Wilkie has combined logical techniques and differential-geometric techniques to establish fundamental Finiteness Theorems for sets definable using the exponential function, and more general Pfaffian functions. The results, going far beyond those obtained by conventional methods, have already had striking applications to Lie groups.