Thomas Hales | |
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Born | |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater | Princeton University |
Known for | Proving Kepler conjecture |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Pittsburgh[1] University of Michigan |
Doctoral advisor | Robert Langlands |
Doctoral students | Julia Gordon |
Website | sites |
Thomas Callister Hales (born June 4, 1958) is an American mathematician working in the areas of representation theory, discrete geometry, and formal verification. In representation theory he is known for his work on the Langlands program and the proof of the fundamental lemma over the group Sp(4) (many of his ideas were incorporated into the final proof of the fundamental lemma, due to Ngô Bảo Châu). In discrete geometry, he settled the Kepler conjecture on the density of sphere packings and the honeycomb conjecture. In 2014, he announced the completion of the Flyspeck Project, which formally verified the correctness of his proof of the Kepler conjecture.