Professor Martin Bridson FRS

Martin Bridson FRS is a mathematician renowned for his work in geometry, topology and group theory (the study of symmetry). He is President of the Clay Mathematics Institute and the Whitehead Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Magdalen College.

Born in the Isle of Man and educated at state schools, Bridson was an undergraduate at Hertford College Oxford (where he is now an Honorary Fellow) and did his graduate work at Cornell University in New York, earning a PhD in 1991. He subsequently held faculty positions at Princeton University, the University of Geneva, and Imperial College London.

His honours include the Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (1999), the Forder Lectureship of the New Zealand Mathematical Society (2005), and a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2012). The American Mathematical Society elected him a Fellow in 2015 and awarded him the Steele Prize in 2020. He gave an Abel Prize Lecture in Oslo in 2009 and was an Invited Speaker at the quadrennial International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006. Bridson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016, in recognition of his “leading role in establishing geometric group theory as a major field of mathematics.”