| Authorised form of name | Jones; Vaughan Frederick Randal (1952 - 2020) |
| Dates | 1952 - 2020 |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Place of birth | Gisborne, New Zealand |
| Date of birth | 31/12/1952 |
| Date of death | 06/09/2020 |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
| Research field | Pure mathematics |
| Mathematical physics |
| Algebra |
| Knot theory |
| Activity | Education:
St Peter's School; Auckland Grammar School; University of Auckland, BSc (1972), MSc (1973); University of Geneva, PhD (1979)
Career:
Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles (1980–1981); Lecturer, University of Pennsylvania (1981–1985); Professor of Mathematics, later Emeritus Professor, University of California, Berkeley (1985-2020); Stevenson Distinguished Professor of mathematics, Vanderbilt University (2011-2020)
Honours:
DCNZM 2002; KNZM 2009
Memberships:
FRSNZ; Honorary Vice-President for life of the International Guild of Knot Tyers (1992); Australian Academy of Science (1992); American Mathematical Society (2012)
Medals/Awards:
Fields Medal (1990), Rutherford Medal (1991); the Jones Medal of the Royal Society of New Zealand named in his honour (2010) |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 15/03/1990 |
| Age at election | 37 |
| Relationships | Married Martha Myers, professor of medicine; three children |
| PublishedWorks | https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n80114917/ |
| OtherInfo | Vaughan Jones’s first work was a complete classification of the action of finite groups on von Neumann algebras of type II. He went on to define an ‘index’ for a subfactor of a II1 factor, and found its possible values, most strikingly the unsuspected discrete series 4 cos2(pi/n). This work has profoundly changed the perspective of its whole field. It also produced a completely new family of representations of the braid groups, and Vaughan showed how these gave a new polynomial invariant for knots. On one side this transformed knot theory, while in another direction it opened up a new field embracing statistical mechanics, conformal quantum field theory, and the quantisation of Lie groups. Vaughan’s most recent work concerns planar algebra and representations of Richard Thompson’s groups F and T.
Sir Vaughan Jones KNZM FRS died on 6 September 2020. |
| Source | References:
Robin J H Clark and Michael J Kelly, 'New Zealand, New Zealanders and the Royal Society' in NR 1994 vol 48 pp 263-281
Sources:
https://royalsociety.org/people/vaughan-jones-11708/ (accessed 9 September 2020)
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Jones (accessed 9 September 2020) |
| Virtual International Authority File | http://viaf.org/viaf/73925463 |
| Code | NA1613 |
Archives associated with this Fellow
| RefNo | Title | Date |
| EC/1990/19 | Jones, Vaughan Frederick Randal: certificate of election to the Royal Society | 1989 |
| IM/002456 | Jones, Vaughan Federick Randal | 1990 |