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Richard Thomas (mathematician)

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Name
  
Richard Thomas

Notable awards
  
Whitehead Prize


Alma mater
  
University of Oxford

Role
  
Mathematician

Doctoral advisor
  
Simon Donaldson

Richard Thomas (mathematician) wwwimperialacukicimagespimgid625362

Institutions
  
Imperial College London

Thesis
  
Gauge Theory on Calabi-Yau Manifolds[1] (1997)

Institution
  
Imperial College London

Richard thomas the katz klemm vafa formula


Professor Richard Paul Winsley Thomas FRS is a pure mathematician working in several areas of geometry. He is a professor at Imperial College London. He studies moduli problems in algebraic geometry, and ‘mirror symmetry’ — a phenomenon in pure mathematics predicted by string theory in theoretical physics.

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Richard Thomas (mathematician) Richard Thomas mathematician Wikipedia

Education

Thomas obtained his PhD on gauge theory on Calabi–Yau manifolds in 1997 under the supervision of Simon Donaldson at the University of Oxford. Together with Simon Donaldson, he defined the Donaldson–Thomas (DT) invariants of Calabi–Yau 3-folds, now a major topic in geometry and the mathematics of string theory.

Career and research

For the special case of curve counting, the more recent Pandharipande–Thomas (PT) stable pair invariants further refine the DT invariants. With Martijn Kool and Vivek Shende, he used the PT invariants to prove the Göttsche conjecture — a classical algebro-geometric problem going back more than a century. He has translated ideas from symplectic geometry through mirror symmetry to produce group actions on derived categories with applications to knot theory.

Awards and honours

In 2004, Thomas was awarded the LMS Whitehead Prize and the Philip Leverhulme Prize, in 2010 the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. Thomas' thesis introduced, as a holomorphic analogue of Casson's 3-manifold invariant, Donaldson–Thomas invariants which have appeared in the field of enumerative algebraic geometry. Thomas was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.

References

Richard Thomas (mathematician) Wikipedia