Thomas Andrew Bridgeland FRS[3] (born 1973) is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sheffield.[1][4][5][6][7][2] He was a senior research fellow in 2011–2013 at All Souls College, Oxford and, since 2013, remains as a Quondam Fellow. He is most well-known for defining Bridgeland stability conditions on triangulated categories.
Tom Bridgeland | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Thomas Andrew Bridgeland[2] 1973 (age 50–51) |
| Education | Shelley High School[2] |
| Alma mater | |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Fourier-Mukai transforms for surfaces and moduli spaces of stable sheaves (2002) |
| Doctoral advisor | Antony Maciocia[1] |
| Website | tom-bridgeland |
Education
Bridgeland was educated at Shelley High School[7] in Huddersfield and Christ's College, Cambridge, where he studied the Mathematical Tripos in the University of Cambridge, graduating with a first class degree in mathematics in 1994 and a distinction in Part III the following year. He completed his PhD[8] at the University of Edinburgh, where he also stayed for a postdoctoral research position.[citation needed]
Research and career
Bridgeland's research interest is in algebraic geometry, focusing on properties of derived categories of coherent sheaves on algebraic varieties.[9][10] His most-cited papers are on stability conditions, on triangulated categories[11] and K3 surfaces;[12] in the first he defines the idea of a stability condition on a triangulated category, and demonstrates that the set of all stability conditions on a fixed category form a manifold, whilst in the second he describes one connected component of the space of stability conditions on the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves on a complex algebraic K3 surface.
Bridgeland's work helped to establish the coherent derived category as a key invariant of algebraic varieties and stimulated world-wide enthusiasm for what had previously been a technical backwater.[3] His results on Fourier–Mukai transforms solve many problems within algebraic geometry, and have been influential in homological and commutative algebra, the theory of moduli spaces, representation theory and combinatorics.[3] Bridgeland's 2002 Annals paper introduced spaces of stability conditions on triangulated categories, replacing the traditional rational slope of moduli problems by a complex phase. This far-reaching innovation gives a rigorous mathematical language for describing D-branes and creates a new area of deep interaction between theoretical physics and algebraic geometry. It has been a central component of subsequent work on homological mirror symmetry.[3]
Bridgeland's research has been funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).[13]
Awards and honours
Bridgeland won the Berwick Prize in 2003, the Adams Prize in 2007 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014.[3] He was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians, Madrid in 2006.
References
This article incorporates text available under the CC BY 4.0 license.