Emmanuel Breuillard, the Sadleirian Professor of Pure Mathematics in Cambridge, has been appointed to the Professorship of Pure Mathematics in Oxford starting on 1 January 2022. Held by Professor Roger Heath-Brown FRS from its inception in 1999 until his retirement in 2016, the Professorship of Pure Mathematics is one of the most prestigious statutory positions in Oxford. Professor Breuillard will be a fellow of Worcester College.
Curvature is a way of measuring the distortion of a space from being flat, and it is ubiquitous in Science. Ricci Curvature, in particular, appears in Einstein’s equations of General Relativity. It controls the heat diffusion in general ambient spaces and it plays a fundamental role in Hamilton-Perelman’s solution of the Poincaré conjecture and of Thurston’s geometrisation conjecture.