Jean Bourgain

Who is Jean Bourgain?

Jean Bourgain is a Belgian mathematician. He has been 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, and since 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is currently an editor for the Annals of Mathematics.

He received his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1977.

His work is in various areas of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory, partial differential equations, spectral theory and recently also in group theory. He has been recognised by a number of awards, most notably the Fields Medal in 1994.

In 2000 Bourgain connected the Kakeya problem to arithmetic combinatorics.

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.