Timothy Gowers
fl. 1963, Marlborough, Wiltshire, England
British mathematician who united Banach space theory and combinatorics, proving the Gowers dichotomy for Banach spaces and a quantitative new proof of Szemerédi's theorem.
William Timothy Gowers was born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, into a family of academics, and was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1990 under Béla Bollobás in combinatorics and Banach space theory. He spent most of his career at Cambridge, becoming a lecturer in 1995, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in 1998, and a professorial fellow of Trinity College. In 2020 he was appointed to the chair of combinatorics at the Collège de France while keeping a position in Cambridge.
Gowers's work connects two fields that had developed largely separately. In Banach space theory he and Bernard Maurey built the first space without an unconditional basic sequence, and Gowers's subsequent dichotomy theorem showed that the wild examples were unavoidable: every Banach space contains either a hereditarily indecomposable subspace or one with an unconditional basis. In combinatorics his Fourier-analytic proof of Szemerédi's theorem — that dense sets of integers contain long arithmetic progressions — gave the first reasonable quantitative bounds and introduced tools, such as the Gowers uniformity norms, that underlie the later proof of the Green–Tao theorem.
Gowers received the Fields Medal in 1998, was knighted in 2012, and served as president of the London Mathematical Society. He founded the Polymath project, an experiment in massively collaborative online mathematics, and has been a prominent advocate for open-access publishing, including through the journal Discrete Analysis which he founded and edits.
Workplaces: University of Cambridge, Collège de France
United Kingdom