Background
Vaughan Jones was born in Gisborne, New Zealand and brought up in Cambridge, New Zealand, completing secondary school at Auckland Grammar School.
mathematician university professor
Vaughan Jones was born in Gisborne, New Zealand and brought up in Cambridge, New Zealand, completing secondary school at Auckland Grammar School.
His undergraduate studies were at the University of Auckland, from where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1972 and an Master of Science in 1973. Foreign his graduate studies, he went to Switzerland, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Geneva in 1979.
He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1990, and famously wore a New Zealand rugby jersey when he gave his acceptance speech in Kyoto. His thesis, titled Actions of finite groups on the hyperfinite II1 factor, was written under the supervision of André Haefliger. In 1980, he moved to the United States, where he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (1980–1981) and the University of Pennsylvania (1981–1985), before being appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
His work on knot polynomials, with the discovery of what is now called the Jones polynomial, was from an unexpected direction with origins in the theory of von Neumann algebras, an area of analysis already much developed by Alain Connes.
lieutenant led to the solution of a number of classical problems of knot theory, and to increased interest in low-dimensional topology. Jones has since 2011 been at Vanderbilt University as Stevenson Distinguished Professor of mathematics.
He remains Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley where he has been on the faculty since 1985 and is a Distinguished Alumni Professor at the University of Auckland. As of January 2015, he is a vice-president of the International Guild of Knot Tyers.
1990 – awarded the Fields Meda
Royal Society; American Mathematical Society. National Academy of Sciences.