Geordie Williamson
Geordie Williamson (born 1981 in Bowral, Australia) is an Australian mathematician who works at the University of Sydney. He became the youngest living Fellow of the Royal Society when he was elected in 2018 at the age of 36.
He studied at Chevalier College, earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Sydney in 2003, and completed his PhD at the University of Freiburg in 2008 under Wolfgang Soergel. After his PhD, Williamson did a postdoc at Oxford and then worked at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics from 2011 to 2016.
Williamson’s research sits in geometric representation theory, a field that links geometry and algebra to study symmetry. With Ben Elias, he gave new proofs and simplifications of the Kazhdan–Lusztig conjectures and helped develop an algebraic approach to the theory of Soergel bimodules. He also produced several important counterexamples that influenced long-standing conjectures in representation theory.
He has received many awards for his work, including the Clay Research Award (2016), the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2017), and the EMS Prize (2016). He was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and has been honored with memberships in the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science. Other honors include an Australian Laureate Fellowship (2023), the Australian Mathematical Society Medal (2018), and the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award (2024).
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 10:47 (CET).