mathematician university professor
Thomas obtained his Doctor of Philosophy 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.
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. Foreign 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.
He has translated ideas from symplectic geometry through mirror symmetry to produce group actions on derived categories with applications to knot theory.
In 2004, Thomas was awarded the Learning Management System 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 (Federal Reserve System) in 2015.
Royal Society.
