*
*Born in Ostend in 1954, the brilliant Flemish mathematician excelled at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), defending his doctoral thesis at just 23 and completing his habilitation two years later. He became a professor at his alma mater in 1981 and also taught in France (Institut des hautes études scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, Essonne) and the United States (Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and University of Illinois).
Bourgain made significant contributions to many areas: Banach spaces, high-dimensional convexity, ergodic theory, harmonic analysis, nonlinear partial differential equations and analytic number theory. His remarkable results earned him numerous honors, including the Langevin Prize of the Académie française des sciences (1985), the Ostrowski Prize (1991), the Fields Medal (1994), and, more recently, the Shaw Prize (2010) and the Crafoord Prize (2012). As Israeli mathematician Elon Lindenstrauss, who won the Fields Medal in 2010 for his research in ergodic theory and number theory, pointed out, "Jean Bourgain's results provide a great many wholly unexpected connections among several fields of research that, before him, were regarded as separate." Tangente will soon devote an article to a mathematical topic explored by this formidable analyst.
