Richard Borcherds
| Richard Borcherds | |
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| Born | Richard Ewen Borcherds 29 November 1959 Cape Town, South Africa |
| Residence | U.K., U.S. |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Mathematics |
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| Alma mater | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Thesis | The leech lattice and other lattices (1984) |
| Doctoral advisor | John Horton Conway |
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| Known for | Borcherds algebra |
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Richard Ewen Borcherds (/ˈbɔːrtʃərdz/; born 29 November 1959) is a British-Americanmathematician currently working in quantum field theory. He is known for his work in lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.
Borcherds was born in Cape Town, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old. His father is a physicist and he has three brothers, two of whom are mathematics teachers. He was a promising mathematician and chess player as a child, winning several national mathematics championships and "was in line for becoming a chess master" before giving up chess after coming to believe that the higher levels of competitive chess are merely about the competition rather than the fun of playing.
He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway.
After receiving his doctorate in 1985 he has held various alternating positions at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, serving as Morrey Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Berkeley from 1987 to 1988. He was a Royal Society University Research Fellow. From 1996 he held a Royal Society Research Professorship at Cambridge before returning to Berkeley in 1999 as Professor of mathematics. At Berkeley, he held a Miller Research Professorship from 2000–2001.
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