让·布尔甘1954—2018

生平

生于奥斯滕德，比利时数学家。他在1994年获菲尔兹奖，表扬他研究巴拿赫空间、调和分析和遍历理论的成果。他于1977年在荷兰语布鲁塞尔自由大学取得博士学位。

2000年，他将挂谷问题与算术组合学拉上关系。

2009年他获选为瑞典皇家科学院的外籍院士。2010年他获得邵逸夫奖数学科学奖。

2012年他获得克拉福德奖数学奖。

Jean Louis, baron Bourgain (French: [buʁɡɛ̃]; (1954-02-28)28 February 1954 – (2018-12-22)22 December 2018) was a Belgian mathematician. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 in recognition of his work on several core topics of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, ergodic theory and nonlinear partial differential equations from mathematical physics.

Biography

Bourgain received his PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 1977. He was 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, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey from 1994 until 2018. He was an editor for the Annals of Mathematics. From 2012 to 2014, he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

His research work included several areas of mathematical analysis such as the geometry of Banach spaces, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, combinatorics, ergodic theory, partial differential equations and spectral theory, and later also group theory. He proved the uniqueness of the solutions for the initial value problem of the Korteweg–De Vries equation. He formulated what became known as the Bourgain slicing problem in high-dimensional convex geometry. In 1985, he proved Bourgain's embedding theorem in metric dimension reduction, which states that every metric space can be embedded into an lₚ space of dimension O(log ²(n)) with distortion O(log(n)). Together with Vitali Milman, he contributed to progress on Mahler’s conjecture in 1987. In 2000, he connected the Kakeya problem to arithmetic combinatorics. As a researcher, he was the author or coauthor of more than 500 articles.

Together with Ciprian Demeter and Larry Guth, he proved Vinogradov's mean-value theorem in 2015.

Bourgain was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late 2014. He died of it on 22 December 2018 at a hospital in Bonheiden, Belgium.

Awards and recognition

Bourgain received several awards during his career, the most notable being the Fields Medal in 1994.

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.

In 2015, he was made a baron by King Philippe of Belgium.

In 2017, he received the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.

In 2018, he received the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.