Keith Martin Ball
FRS FRSE
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's national academy of science and letters, judged to be "eminently distinguished in their subject". This soci ...
(born 26 December 1960) is a mathematician and professor at the
University of Warwick
The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands (county), West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded i ...
. He was scientific director of the
International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) from 2010 to 2014.
Education
Ball was educated at
Berkhamsted School
Berkhamsted School is an independent day school in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. The present school was formed in 1997 by the amalgamation of the original Berkhamsted School, founded in 1541 by John Incent, Dean of St Paul's Cathedral, ...
and
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...
where he studied the
Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. It is the oldest Tripos examined at the University.
Origin
In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was a ...
and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
in 1982 and a PhD in 1987 for research supervised by
Béla Bollobás
Béla Bollobás FRS (born 3 August 1943) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul E ...
.
Research
Keith Ball's research is in the fields of
functional analysis
Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (e.g. Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics)#Defini ...
, high-dimensional and
discrete geometry
Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geome ...
and
information theory
Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...
. He is the author of ''Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations''.
Awards and honours
Ball was elected 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, meetings, ...
(AMS) in 2012
and a
Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. His Royal Society citation reads
References
1960 births
Living people
People educated at Berkhamsted School
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
English mathematicians
Academics of the University of Warwick
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