Bourgain, Jean

Jean Bourgain, (born February 28, 1954, Ostend, Belgium—died December 22, 2018, Bonheiden), Belgian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994 for his work in analysis.

Bourgain received a Ph.D. from the Free University of Brussels (1977). He held appointments at the Free University (1981–85); jointly at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (U.S.), and the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies, Bures-sur-Yvette, France (1985–94); and from 1994 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.

Bourgain received the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1994, where his achievements in several fields were highlighted: advances in the study of subspaces of Banach spaces that resemble Hilbert subspaces, a proof of Luis Antonio Santaló’s inequality, a new approach to some problems in ergodic theory, results in harmonic analysis and classical operators, and nonlinear partial differential equations. Bourgain’s work was noteworthy for the versatility it displayed in applying ideas from wide-ranging mathematical disciplines to the solution of diverse problems.

In addition to the Fields Medal, Bourgain was the recipient of numerous other awards, notably the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2012). His publications included New Classes of L^p-Spaces (1981) and, with A. Casazza, J. Lindenstrauss, and L. Tzafriri, Banach Spaces with a Unique Unconditional Basis, up to Permutation (1985).