Special Erdős Memorial Lecture

The next Erdős Memorial Lecture will be given by William Timothy Gowers, University of Cambridge, at this meeting on Saturday, March 15.

Title: Decomposing bounded functions

Abstract: Many results in the new and rapidly growing area of arithmetic combinatorics concern, in one way or another, the general problem of writing a function $f$ as a linear combination of other functions with prescribed properties. I shall discuss several results of this kind, explaining why they are important and giving some idea of how they can be proved.

Short biography: Timothy Gowers was born in Marlborough, England in 1963. He was an undergraduate and research student at Cambridge University, receiving his PhD in 1990 under the supervision of Béla Bollobás. His early research was in the geometry of Banach spaces, and included the solutions of two problems posed by Banach himself. More recently he has worked in arithmetic combinatorics, and especially the circle of ideas surrounding Szemerédi's theorem. He was awarded a European Mathematical Society prize in 1996 and a Fields medal in 1998, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.

Updated, 1/16/07, pop@ams.org