Born in New Zealand in 1952, Vaughan Jones graduated from the University of Auckland in 1973, studied at the École de physique in Geneva (Switzerland) from 1974 to 1980, and continued his career at several universities in the United States. He received numerous honors in mathematics, most notably the Fields Medal in 1990, and became a world-renowned specialist in knot theory—and a delight to know. The American mathematician Joan Birman, another leading expert in the field, would praise his "open-mindedness and generosity, in the finest tradition and spirit of mathematics".
Smoke rings and sheep ---------------------------------
Before embarking on mathematics, Vaughan Jones first studied physics in Geneva, and his research would leave its mark on mathematical physics. The study of knots, so dear to the New Zealand mathematician, was initiated by 19th-century physicists such as Peter Guthrie Tait (1831–1901), who investigated these topological configurations through smoke rings, rediscovering the research of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) and his student Johann Benedict Listing (1808–1882). Physicists later discovered anyons, particles that exist only in two dimensions and lie somewhere between bosons and fermions. When several anyons are involved, their paths intertwine like the strands of a braid, and they behave differently depending on the braid they form in spacetime. This is where the Jones polynomial entered the picture in 1989 (see below): it can distinguish between anyons just as it can between knots. The way was now open for quantum computers, which use anyons—and whose advent owes something to the inventive genius of the New Zealander.
Jones enjoyed “braiding” connections between seemingly separate fields and found many others, for example between knot theory and statistical physics (the study of the average properties of large numbers of particles). A keen kitesurfer who relished challenges and often pondered problems involving physics, he once recounted wondering about "the distance from the shore to the first whitecap", the little patch of foam whipped up by the wind at sea: does it depend solely on the strength of the wind, or on the shape of the seabed?