Professor Jack Thorne (2004) has become the youngest living member of the Royal Society, aged 32. He has been recognised for multiple breakthroughs in diverse areas of algebraic number theory.
Professor Thorne studied Mathematics at Trinity Hall from 2004 to 2008. He went on to complete a PhD at Harvard, was awarded a Clay Fellowship and returned to Cambridge as a Reader and to Trinity Hall as a Fellow, less than ten years after his time here as an undergraduate. He works in number theory where, among other things, he has further developed the ideas of Wiles and Taylor. He shared the Ramanujan prize (awarded every year to a young mathematician judged to have done outstanding work in Ramanujan’s fields of interest) and gave one of the invited lectures at the four-yearly International Congress of Mathematicians.
The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship made up of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.
Dr Venki Ramakrishnan, President of the Royal Society, said: “At this time of global crisis, the importance of scientific thinking, and the medicines, technologies and insights it delivers, has never been clearer. Our Fellows and Foreign Members are central to the mission of the Royal Society, to use science for the benefit of humanity.
“While election to the Fellowship is a recognition of exceptional individual contributions to the sciences, it is also a network of expertise that can be drawn on to address issues of societal, and global significance. This year’s Fellows and Foreign Members have helped shape the 21st century through their work at the cutting-edge of fields from human genomics, to climate science and machine learning.
“It gives me great pleasure to celebrate these achievements, and those yet to come, and welcome them into the ranks of the Royal Society.”
