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Professor Geordie Williamson. Picture by Jayne Ion

Top Interesting Interesting facts about Geordie Williamson

A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems.

Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. One of the Mathematicians in Australia is Geordie. Geordie Williamson  (born in 1981 in  Bowral, Australia) is an Australian mathematician at the University of Sydney.

He became the youngest living  Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36.

Here are some interesting facts about Geordie Williamson;

1. Williamson studied at three universities

Aerial view of Freiburg/ Breisgau, technical faculty of the Albert-Ludwigs university. By Taxiarchos228

Educated at Chevalier College, Williamson graduated in 1999 with a UAI of 99.45.

He studied at the University of Sydney and graduated 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.

2. Williamson dealt with a geometric representation of group theory

After his Ph.D., Williamson was a  post-doctoral researcher at the  University of Oxford based at  St. Peters College, Oxford, and from 2011 until 2016 he was at the  Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.

Williamson deals with a geometric representation of group theory. With Ben Elias, he gave a new proof and a simplification of the theory of the  Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures (previously proved in 1981 by both  Beilinson-Bernstein and Brylinski-Kashiwara).

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. 

3. Geordie is also known for several counterexamples

He is also known for several counterexamples. In 1980, Lusztig suggested a character formula for simple modules of reductive groups over fields of finite characteristics p.

The conjecture was proved in 1994-95 by a combination of three papers, one by Henning Haahr Andersen, Jens Carsten Jantzen, and Wolfgang Soergel, one by David Kazhdan and George Lusztig, and one by Masaki Kashiwara and Toshiyuki Tanisaki 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.

4. He is an award winner and a speaker in different congress

In 2016, he received the Chevalley Prize of the American Mathematical Society and the  Clay Research Award.

He is an invited speaker at the  European congress of mathematicians in Berlin in 2016 (Shadows of Hodge theory in representation theory).

In 2016 he was awarded the EMS Prize, and in 2017 he was awarded the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.

In 2018, he was a 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. Williamson was awarded the 2018 Australian Mathematical Society Medal.

5. Williamson has authored many books

Williamson Geordie has partnered with other authors to publish several books regarding mathematics. By Renate Schmid

With Ben Elias: The Hodge Theory of Soergel bimodules, Annals of Mathematics, Band 180, 2014, 1089–1136, 

Schubert calculus and torsion explosion, (With Appendix by A. Kontorovich, P. McNamara, G. Williamson), Journal of the AMS 30 (2017), 1023–1046,  

Modular intersection cohomology complexes on flag varieties, Mathematische Zeitschrift, Band 272, 2012, S. 697–727 (With Appendix by Tom Braden). On an analog of the James conjecture, Representation Theory, Band 18, 2014, S. 15–27,  

With Ben Elias: Kazhdan-Lusztig conjectures and shadows of Hodge theory, Springer Progress in Mathematics volume 319. With Daniel Juteau, Carl Mautner: Parity sheaves, Journal of the AMS, Band 27, 2014, S. 1169–1212,  

6. Williamson is the former chief literary critic of the Australian newspaper

Geordie Williamson is the publisher of Pan Macmillan’s Picador imprint. He is the former chief literary critic of the Australian newspaper and his essays and reviews have been appearing in newspapers and magazines here and in the UK for over a decade.

In 2011, he won the Pascall Prize for criticism, Australia’s only major national prize awarded for critical writing.

He published The Burning Library, a collection of essays on neglected Australian writers, in 2012. He lives in the Blue Mountains with his family.

7. Geordie was the youngest member of the Royal Society

Geordie Williamson, the youngest member of the Royal Society. By Duncan.Hull.

He is one of 50 new Fellows from across the Commonwealth of Nations. He attended a ceremony in London in July to accept his election, alongside South African engineer and inventor, Elon Musk.

It is unusual to be elected to the Royal Society under the age of 40. Professor Williamson at 36 and is now the Royal Society’s youngest living fellow (if you choose not to include Prince William, a Royal Fellow, who is 35).

The Royal Society holds a special place for Professor Williamson. As a child, he was enthralled by the brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, a largely self-taught mathematician who grew up under British rule in Madras. 

8.  Geordie advocates for Australian writers and Australian writing

That generosity of spirit is also manifested in Geordie’s passion for Australian writing. As anybody who’s heard his regular spot on  ABC 702 will know, he’s a tireless advocate for Australian writers and Australian writing, but he also works incredibly hard behind the scenes.

In recent years he’s been a judge on the Vogel Award, and the NSW Premier’s Awards (both of which are gigs that involve a huge amount of work for almost no remuneration) as well as appearing almost constantly at Festivals and other events around the country.

9. He is a Professor of Mathematics at the University 

University of Sydney main campus. Picture by Kanzcech

Geordie is, currently a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sydney. Before coming to Sydney he spent five years as an Advanced Researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn.

In 2020 that will lead a special year on Representation Theory at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton

10. He made several fundamental contributions to the mathematics field