Alex James Wilkie Federal Reserve System is a British mathematician known for his contributions to Model theory and logic.
Education
Alex Wilkie attended Aylesbury Grammar School and went on to gain his Bachelor of Science in mathematics with first class honours from University College London in 1969, his Master of Science (in mathematical logic) from the University of London in 1970, and his Doctor of Philosophy from the Bedford College, University of London in 1973 under the supervision of Wilfrid Hodges with a dissertation entitled Models of Number Theory.
Career
Previously Reader in Mathematical Logic at the University of Oxford, he was appointed to the Fielden Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of Manchester in 2007. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. To quote the citation
Wilkie has combined logical techniques and differential-geometric techniques to establish fundamental Finiteness Theorems for sets definable using the exponential function, and more general Pfaffian functions.
The results, going far beyond those obtained by conventional methods, have already had striking applications to Lie groups.
After his Doctor of Philosophy he went on to an appointment as a lecturer in mathematics at Leicester University from 1972 to 1973, then a research fellow at the Open University from 1973 until 1978. He spent two periods as a junior lecturer in mathematics at Oxford University (1978-1980 and 1981-1982) with (1980-1981) as a visiting assistant professor at Yale University.
In 1980 Wilkie solved Tarski"s high school algebra problem. In October 1982 Wilkie was appointed as a research fellow in the department of mathematics at the University of Paris VII, then returned to England the following year to take up a three-year SERC (now Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) advanced research fellowship at the University of Manchester.
After two years he was appointed lecturer in the Department of Mathematics.
In 1986 he went on to Oxford where he was appointed to the readership in mathematical logic there which had become vacant upon the retirement of Robin Gandy. He remained in this post until appointment to the Fielden Chair at Manchester. He was elected to the Council of the London Mathematical Society in 2007, vice-president of the Association for Symbolic Logic (2006) and president of the Association for Symbolic Logic in 2009.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Membership
Royal Society; American Mathematical Society.