James McKernan (born 1964) is a mathematician, and a professor of mathematics at the
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is ...
. He was a professor at
MIT from 2007 until 2013.
Education
McKernan was educated at the
Campion School, Hornchurch
The Campion School is a Roman Catholic boys' secondary school and coeducational sixth form in Hornchurch, London, England. The school converted to academy status in August 2011, and has a specialism in science.
History
The Campion School was ...
, and
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
, before going on to earn his Ph.D. from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...
in 1991. His dissertation, ''On the Hyperplane Sections of a Variety in Projective Space'', was supervised by
Joe Harris.
Recognition
McKernan was the joint winner of the
Cole Prize The Frank Nelson Cole Prize, or Cole Prize for short, is one of twenty-two prizes awarded to mathematicians by the American Mathematical Society, one for an outstanding contribution to algebra, and the other for an outstanding contribution to numbe ...
in 2009, and joint recipient of the
Clay Research Award __NOTOC__
The Clay Research Award is an annual award given by the Oxford-based Clay Mathematics Institute to mathematicians to recognize their achievement in mathematical research. The following mathematicians have received the award:
{, class=" ...
in 2007. Both honors were received jointly with his colleague
Christopher Hacon. He gave an
invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2010, on the topic of "Algebraic Geometry". He was the joint winner (with
Christopher Hacon) of the 2018
Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics is an annual award of the Breakthrough Prize series announced in 2013.
It is funded by Yuri Milner and Mark Zuckerberg and others. The annual award comes with a cash gift of $3 million. The Breakthrough Pri ...
.
He was elected as a Fellow of the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meeting ...
in the 2020 Class, for "contributions to algebraic geometry, in particular his proof of the finite generation of the canonical ring, the existence of flips and the boundedness of varieties of log general type".
References
External links
*
Citation for 2009 Cole Prize in AlgebraThe work of Hacon and McKernan
1964 births
Living people
Algebraic geometers
20th-century British mathematicians
21st-century British mathematicians
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Harvard University alumni
University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
Clay Research Award recipients
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
Simons Investigator
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