Richard ewen borcherds biography books

Richard Ewen Borcherds (born 29 November 1959) is a British mathematician specializing in lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998.

Personal life

Borcherds was born in Cape Town, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old.[2] His father is a physicist and he has three brothers, two of whom are mathematics teachers.[3] 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 after coming to believe that the higher levels of competitive chess are merely about the competition rather than the fun of playing.[3] He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge,[4] where he studied under John Horton Conway.[5] After receiving his doctorate in 1985 he has held various alternating positions at Cambridge and the Univ