Inaugural speech by Timothy Gowers : "Combinatorics"

Timothy Gowers was born in 1963 in Marlborough, United Kingdom. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained his PhD under Béla Bollobás. After two years as a Research Fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge), he became a lecturer at University College London, before returning to Cambridge in 1995, first as a lecturer, and from 1998 as the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics. He was a visiting professor at Princeton between 2000 and 2002.

Since 2009 he has been a Research Professor of the Royal Society. During the 2017-2018 academic year, he was awarded the Chair of the Fondation Sciences Mathématiques de Paris. He received an award from the European Mathematical Society in 1996, and a Fields Medal in 1998. In 2012, he was knighted for services to mathematics. He is the author of Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction, and the senior editor of the Princeton Companion to Mathematics.

He was appointed Professor of Combinatorics at the Collège de France in May 2020 and will give his first course entitled "Tools of Combinatorics" in 2021.