Keith Martin Ball (born 26 December 1960) is a mathematician and professor at the

University of Warwick The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...

. He was scientific director of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) from 2010 to 2014.

Education

Ball was educated at

Berkhamsted School Berkhamsted School is a private day school (known in the UK as a public school), in the market town of Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, England. The present school was formed in 1997 by the amalgamation of the original Berkhamsted School, founded ...

and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

where he studied the

Cambridge Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was a distinctive written examination of undergraduate s ...

and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

in 1982 and a PhD in 1987 for research supervised by

Béla Bollobás Béla Bollobás FRS (born 3 August 1943) is a Hungarian-born British mathematician who has worked in various areas of mathematics, including functional analysis, combinatorics, graph theory, and percolation. He was strongly influenced by Paul E ...

Research

Keith Ball's research is in the fields of

functional analysis Functional analysis is a branch of mathematical analysis, the core of which is formed by the study of vector spaces endowed with some kind of limit-related structure (for example, Inner product space#Definition, inner product, Norm (mathematics ...

, high-dimensional and

discrete geometry Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geom ...

and

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

. He is the author of ''Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations''.

Awards and honours

Ball was elected a Fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

(AMS) in 2012 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2013. His Royal Society citation reads In 2023, he was elected a member of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...

References

1960 births Living people People educated at Berkhamsted School Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the American Mathematical Society Members of Academia Europaea English mathematicians Academics of the University of Warwick {{UK-scientist-stub