What an astonishing and brilliant career Jean Bourgain had! Born in Ostend, on the Belgian coast, he enjoyed a meteoric rise at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he defended his doctoral thesis at the age of 23 and obtained his habilitation two years later. He became a professor at his alma mater in 1981 and taught in France (at the Institut des hautes études scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, Essonne) and the United States (at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the University of Illinois). He was also a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. This exceptional analyst distinguished himself in a remarkable range of fields and received a host of accolades. His work includes important and innovative results in the geometry of Banach spaces (topological vector spaces equipped with a norm), high-dimensional convexity, harmonic analysis, analytic number theory, ergodic theory (which deals with measure-preserving dynamical systems), partial differential equations, spectral analysis and even, towards the end of his life, algebra (group theory)!
This type of clock is a model of ?/ 12 ?. Indeed, five hours after 9 o'clock, it is 2 o'clock.
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A shower of honours
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