Geordie Williamson

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Geordie Williamson
FAA
Williamson at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2018
Born1981 (age 42–43)
EducationChevalier College
Alma materUniversity of Sydney (BA)
University of Freiburg (PhD)
AwardsClay Research Award (2016)
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

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

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

.

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

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

Awards and honours

In 2016, he received the Chevalley Prize of the American Mathematical Society

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