Professor Martin R Bridson FRS has been appointed President of the Clay Mathematics Institute from October 1, 2018. He is the Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. Until earlier this summer, he was Head of the Mathematical Institute at Oxford.
He studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford, before moving to Cornell in 1986 for his graduate work. He completed his PhD there in 1991, under the supervision of Karen Vogtmann, with a thesis on Geodesics and Curvature in Metric Simplicial Complexes. After appointments at Princeton and at the University of Geneva, he returned to Oxford in 1993 as a Tutorial Fellow of Pembroke College. In 2002, he moved to Imperial College London as Professor of Mathematics and returned again to Oxford in 2007 as Whitehead Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2015) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (2016), to which he was elected "for his leading role in establishing geometric group theory as a major field of mathematics".
Professor Bridson has been recognised for his ground-breaking work on geometry, topology, and group theory in awards from the London Mathematical Society (Whitehead Prize 1999, Forder Lectureship 2005) and from the Royal Society (Wolfson Research Merit Award 2002), and by invitations to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2006 and to give the Abel Prize Lecture in Oslo in 2009.
Martin succeeds Professor Nick Woodhouse who has been President since 2012.