Green Family Lecture Series: “God May or May Not Play Dice but He Sure Loves a von Neumann Algebra” by Vaughan Jones

May 2, 2018

Speaker Bio

Jones_Vaughan_portrait tree Vandy with credit #2Vaughan Jones is a mathematician known for his work on von Neumann algebras and knot polynomials. He obtained a BSc and an MSc at the University of Auckland and his PhD at the University of Geneva. In 1980, he moved to the United States, where he taught at UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania before being appointed as Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. Jones has been at Vanderbilt University as Stevenson Distinguished Professor of mathematics since 2011, while remaining Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and Distinguished Alumni Professor at the University of Auckland. Jones was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990 for his discovery of the quantization of the index of a subfactor, and what is now called the Jones polynomial of a knot.