Geordie Williamson

Geordie Williamson
FRS
Geordie Williamson, Oberwolfach 2012
Born 1981 (age 36–37)
Bowral, Australia
Scientific career
Institutions University of Sydney
University of Oxford
Website www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/geordie

Geordie Williamson FRS (born 1981 in Bowral, Australia) is an Australian Professor of Mathematics 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

Williamson studied from 2000 at the University of Sydney 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 (Singular Soergel Bimodules)[5].

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 (Advanced Researcher with a Research Professorship).

Williamson deals with a geometric representation of group theory. With Ben Elias (mathematician), he achieved the first purely algebraic proof and a simplification of the theory of Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures (previously proved by Jean-Luc Brylinski and Masaki Kashiwara in 1981, with Alexander Beilinson and Joseph Bernstein). 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 by Henning Haahr Andersen, Jens Carsten Jantzen and Wolfgang Soergel 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.

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 analogy 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. 1169–2012, arXiv:0906.2994

Awards and honours

In 2016, he received the Chevalley Prize of the American Mathematical Society[6] and the Clay Research Award[7]. 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[8].

References

  1. ↑ http://people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/geordie/
  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. ↑ Geordie Williamson at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ↑ "Geordie Williamson to Receive 2016 AMS Chevalley Prize". Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.
  7. ↑ "Clay Mathematics Institute Research Awards".
  8. ↑ "Professor Geordie Williamson". Australian Academy of Science.
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