Vaughan Jones

Jones was born in New Zealand, did his thesis in Geneva, and has been professor of mathematics at Berkeley since 1985. He has won wide recognition, most notably a Fields Medal in 1990, the equivalent in mathematics of a Nobel Prize. He has also been awarded a number of honorary degrees and been elected to the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Norwegian Royal Society, the London Mathematical Society, and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Jones the title of Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, noting that his mathematical work is being used to understand the complex knotted configuration of DNA.Jones discovered "some fascinating, and totally unexpected, relations concerning the dimensions of certain subalgebras of these von Neumann algebras. This work has unleashed new lines of investigation that remain vibrant today. But then he combined these results with observations from knot theory, a totally unrelated area of mathematics, that tries to understand the topological structure of knots — illustrated by the different ways a piece of string can be knotted. Jones discovered a new algebraic invariant of knots, now called the Jones polynomial, a vast improvement on the Alexander polynomial that had been discovered in 1920s. Jones' work was a huge advance that rejuvenated the field. The Jones polynomial is particularly well suited to study how DNA molecules knot and coil."