Sir William Timothy Gowers, FRS (/ˈɡaʊ.ərz/; born 20 November 1963)[1] is a British mathematician.

[6] In 1981, Gowers won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad with a perfect score.

[7] He completed his PhD, with a dissertation on Symmetric Structures in Banach Spaces[8] at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1990, supervised by Béla Bollobás.

In May 2020 it was announced[9] that he would be assuming the title chaire de combinatoire at the College de France beginning in October 2020, though he intends[10] to continue to reside in Cambridge and maintain a part-time affiliation at the university, as well as enjoy the privileges of his life fellowship of Trinity College.

He also introduced the Gowers norms, a tool in arithmetic combinatorics, and provided the basic techniques for analysing them.

[22] In May 2020 he was made a professor at the Collège de France, a historic institution dedicated to popularising science.

[25] The first problem in what is called the Polymath Project, Polymath1, was to find a new combinatorial proof to the density version of the Hales–Jewett theorem.

[26] In 2009, with Olof Sisask and Alex Frolkin, he invited people to post comments to his blog to contribute to a collection of methods of mathematical problem solving.

[29][2] A petition ensued, branded the Cost of Knowledge project, in which researchers commit to stop supporting Elsevier journals.

Commenting on the petition in The Guardian, Alok Jha credited Gowers with starting an Academic Spring.

[30][31] In 2016, Gowers started Discrete Analysis to demonstrate that a high-quality mathematics journal could be inexpensively produced outside of the traditional academic publishing industry.

[32] In 1994, Gowers was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich where he discussed the theory of infinite-dimensional Banach spaces.

[33] In 1996, Gowers received the Prize of the European Mathematical Society, and in 1998 the Fields Medal for research on functional analysis and combinatorics.

[1] In November 2012, Gowers opted to undergo catheter ablation to treat a sporadic atrial fibrillation, after performing a mathematical risk–benefit analysis to decide whether to have the treatment.