Kevin Mark Buzzard (born 21 September 1968) is a British

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

and currently a professor of pure mathematics at

Imperial College London Imperial College London, also known as Imperial, is a Public university, public research university in London, England. Its history began with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, who envisioned a Al ...

. He specialises in arithmetic geometry and the

Langlands program In mathematics, the Langlands program is a set of conjectures about connections between number theory, the theory of automorphic forms, and geometry. It was proposed by . It seeks to relate the structure of Galois groups in algebraic number t ...

Biography

While attending the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe he competed in the

International Mathematical Olympiad The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is widely regarded as the most prestigious mathematical competition in the wor ...

, where he won a bronze medal in 1986 and a gold medal with a perfect score in 1987. He obtained a B.A. degree in Mathematics at

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 was Senior Wrangler in 1990, and a C.A.S.M. in 1991. He then received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Richard Taylor with a thesis titled ''The levels of modular representations'' in 1995. He took a lectureship at

in 1998, a readership in 2002, and was appointed to a professorship in 2004. From October to December 2002 he held a visiting professorship at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

, having previously worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1995), the University of California Berkeley (1996-7), and the Institute Henri Poincaré in Paris (2000). He was awarded a Whitehead Prize by the

London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's Learned society, learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh ...

in 2002 for "his distinguished work in number theory", and the Senior Berwick Prize in 2008. In 2017, he launched an ongoing formalization project and blog involving the Lean theorem prover and has since promoted the use of computer

proof assistants In computer science and mathematical logic, a proof assistant or interactive theorem prover is a software tool to assist with the development of formal proofs by human–machine collaboration. This involves some sort of interactive proof edi ...

in future mathematics research. He gave a plenary lecture at the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the IMU Abacus Medal (known before ...

in 2022 on the topic. He was the PhD supervisor to musician Dan Snaith, also known as Caribou, who received a PhD in mathematics from

for his work on '' Overconvergent Siegel Modular Symbols''. In 2024, Buzzard and collaborators were handed a five-year EPSRC grant to begin formalising

Fermat's Last Theorem In number theory, Fermat's Last Theorem (sometimes called Fermat's conjecture, especially in older texts) states that no three positive number, positive integers , , and satisfy the equation for any integer value of greater than . The cases ...

in Lean.

References

External links

Kevin Buzzard's professional webpage

Kevin Buzzard's personal webpage

Kevin Buzzard's blog (Xena Project)
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Buzzard, Kevin 1968 births 20th-century British mathematicians 21st-century British mathematicians Institute for Advanced Study visiting scholars Living people British number theorists Harvard University staff Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Academics of Imperial College London People educated at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe Whitehead Prize winners International Mathematical Olympiad participants