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

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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 {{UK-mathematician-stub