Richard Thomas (mathematician)

Richard Thomas
Born	Richard Paul Winsley Thomas
Institutions	Imperial College London
Alma mater	University of Oxford
Thesis	Gauge Theory on Calabi-Yau Manifolds[1] (1997)
Doctoral advisor	Simon Donaldson
Notable awards	Whitehead Prize[2] (2004)
Website www2.imperial.ac.uk/~rpwt

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.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5][6]

References