Geordie Williamson

FRS FAA
Williamson at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2018
Born1981 (age 42–43)
Bowral, Australia
EducationChevalier College
Alma materUniversity of Sydney (BA)
University of Freiburg (PhD)
AwardsClay Research Award (2016)
New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2017)
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Sydney
University of Oxford
Max Planck Institute for Mathematics
ThesisSingular Soergel bimodules (2008)
Websitewww.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/geordie

Geordie Williamson FRS FAA (born 1981 in Bowral, Australia) is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney.[1][2][3] He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36.[4]

Education

Educated at Chevalier College,[5] Williamson graduated in 1999 with a UAI of 99.45.[6] He studied at the University of Sydney and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2003 and then at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, where he received his doctorate in 2008 under the supervision of Wolfgang Soergel.[7][8] Williamson is the brother of the late James Williamson, a World Solo 24-hour mountain bike champion who died while competing in South Africa in 2010.[9]

Research and career

After his PhD, Williamson was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, based at St. Peter's College, Oxford and from 2011 until 2016 he was at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.

Williamson deals with a geometric representation of group theory. With Ben Elias, he gave a new proof and a simplification of the theory of the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures (previously proved in 1981 by both Beilinson–Bernstein and Brylinski–Kashiwara). For this purpose, they built on works by Wolfgang Soergel and developed a purely algebraic Hodge theory of Soergel bimodules about polynomial rings, In this context, they also succeeded in proving the long-standing positive presumption of positivity for the coefficients of the Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials for Coxeter groups. For Weyl groups (special Coxeter groups, which are connected to Lie groups), David Kazhdan and George Lusztig succeeded in doing so by identifying the polynomials with certain invariants (local intersection cohomology) of Schubert varieties. Elias and Williamson were able to follow this path of proof also for more general groups of reflection (Coxeter groups), although there is no geometrical interpretation in contrast to the case of the Weyl groups.

He is also known for several counterexamples. In 1980, Lusztig suggested a character formula for simple modules of reductive groups over fields of finite characteristic p. The conjecture was proved in 1994-95 by a combination of three papers, one by Henning Haahr Andersen, Jens Carsten Jantzen, and Wolfgang Soergel, one by David Kazhdan and George Lusztig and one by Masaki Kashiwara and Toshiyuki Tanisaki for sufficiently large group-specific characteristics (without explicit bound) and later by Peter Fiebig for a very high explicitly stated bound. Williamson found several infinite families of counterexamples to the generally suspected validity limits of Lusztig's conjecture. He also found counterexamples to a 1990 conjecture of Gordon James on symmetric groups. His work also provided new perspectives on the respective conjectures. In 2023 he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship to further his research into fundamental symmetries.[10]

Publications

  • With Ben Elias: The Hodge Theory of Soergel bimodules, Annals of Mathematics, Band 180, 2014, 1089–1136, arXiv:1212.0791
  • Schubert calculus and torsion explosion, (With Appendix by A. Kontorovich, P. McNamara, G. Williamson), Journal of the AMS 30 (2017), 1023–1046, arXiv:1309.5055
  • Modular intersection cohomology complexes on flag varieties, Mathematische Zeitschrift, Band 272, 2012, S. 697–727 (With Appendix by Tom Braden), arXiv:0709.0207
  • On an analogue of the James conjecture, Representation Theory, Band 18, 2014, S. 15–27, arXiv:1212.0794
  • With Ben Elias: Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures and shadows of Hodge theory, Springer Progress in Mathematics volume 319, arXiv:1403.1650
  • With Daniel Juteau, Carl Mautner: Parity sheaves, Journal of the AMS, Band 27, 2014, S. 1169–1212, arXiv:0906.2994

Awards and honours

In 2016, he received the Chevalley Prize of the American Mathematical Society[11] and the Clay Research Award.[12] He is an invited speaker at the European Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin 2016 (Shadows of Hodge theory in representation theory). In 2016 he was awarded the EMS Prize, for 2017 he was awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize. In 2018, he was plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) and the Australian Academy of Science.[13] Williamson was awarded the 2018 Australian Mathematical Society Medal[14] and the NSW Premier's Prizes for Science & Engineering: Excellence in Mathematics, Earth Sciences, Chemistry or Physics in 2022.[15]

References

  1. ↑ "Geordie Williamson".
  2. ↑ Notices AMS, 2016, Nr.4, Chevalley-Preis für Williamson, pdf
  3. ↑ "Professor Geordie Williamson". University of Sydney. 11 April 2013.
  4. ↑ "Professor Geordie Williamson elected Fellow of the Royal Society". University of Sydney. 10 May 2018.
  5. ↑ "Past Chev student to become Royal Society's youngest Fellow". ChevNews. Chevalier College. 14 May 2018. Retrieved 11 May 2019.
  6. ↑ Elliott, Tim (13 July 2018). "Maths prodigy comes home to establish $5 million world-class maths centre". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 18 March 2022.
  7. ↑ Williamson, Geordie (2008). Singular Soergel Bimodules (PhD thesis). OCLC 315589361.
  8. ↑ Geordie Williamson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  9. ↑ Kogoy, Peter (26 March 2010). "Cycling mourns the loss of James Williamson". The Australian.
  10. ↑ "2023 Laureate Profile: Professor Geordie Williamson". Australian Research Council. Retrieved 4 July 2023.
  11. ↑ "Geordie Williamson to Receive 2016 AMS Chevalley Prize". Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.
  12. ↑ "Clay Mathematics Institute Research Awards".
  13. ↑ "Professor Geordie Williamson". Australian Academy of Science.
  14. ↑ "Australian Mathematical Society Medal".
  15. ↑ "Leading neuroscientist Glenda Halliday named NSW Scientist of the Year". NSW Government. 2 November 2022. Retrieved 2 November 2022.
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