Richard Borcherds
British-American mathematician (born 1959)
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Early life and education
Borcherds was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old.
Borcherds was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham. As a student, Borcherds won a gold medal, silver medal, and special prize in the International Mathematical Olympiad. He attended university at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway.
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Career
After receiving his doctorate in 1985, Borcherds has held various alternating positions at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, serving as Morrey assistant professor of mathematics at Berkeley from 1987 to 1988. He was a Royal Society University Research Fellow. From 1996 he held a Royal Society Research Professorship at Cambridge before returning to Berkeley in 1999 as professor of mathematics.
Mathematical work
He did notable work on the Monstrous moonshine theory.
He introduced vertex algebras.
Autism
An interview with Simon Singh for The Guardian, in which Borcherds suggested he might have some sort of traits possibly associated with Asperger syndrome, led to a chapter about him in a book on autism by Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen insinuated that while Borcherds may have had autistic traits, he did not meet a formal diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome.