William Timothy Gowers

Sir William Timothy ('Tim') Gowers FRS is a British mathematician and 1998 Fields Medalist, recognised for connecting functional analysis and combinatorics (Banach space theory, quasirandom groups). He represented the United Kingdom at the 1981 International Mathematical Olympiad, winning a gold medal with a perfect score of 42. He has been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and held Cambridge's Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics before becoming, in October 2020, Professeur titulaire de la chaire Combinatoire at the College de France - the first combinatorics chair there. He is also widely known as a public voice on mathematics and, more recently, on how AI is changing mathematical practice.

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• Represented the United Kingdom at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 1981 and won gold with a perfect score of 42/42, ranking 1st (100%).Jul 1981
• In an August 2026 blog post 'What sort of maths are LLMs good at?', Gowers engages seriously with OpenAI's claim to have solved ten major open problems; a Fields Medalist publicly re-evaluating AI's mathematical capability is a notable shift in where he now focuses his writing.Aug 12, 2026
• Published the code behind his Human-Oriented Automatic Theorem Proving effort as the GitHub repo 'human-style-atp' (MIT), and has said he is taking on PhD students in automatic theorem proving - evidence his current research direction is machine-assisted proving.2024
• Won the Fields Medal in 1998 for bridging functional analysis and combinatorics.1998
• Describes himself as 'a combinatorialist in a fairly broad sense', drawn to problems that connect to analysis; the 2020 College de France post is the first combinatorics chair in that institution's history.Oct 2020
• Born 20 November 1963 in Marlborough, Wiltshire; educated at Eton College and the University of Cambridge (PhD 1990 under Bela Bollobas).Nov 20, 1963