Honorary Professor: Keith Ball

Keith Ball has been made an Honorary Professor.

He obtained his BA (1982) and PhD (1987) in Mathematics from Cambridge University.

He worked for several years at Texas A&M University and then became a lecturer at UCL in 1990.

He was promoted to a professorship there in 1996 and to the Astor Professorship in 2007.

He has held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientique, Princeton University, Microsoft Research, the Institut Henri Poincare and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor).

Professor Ball’s research is in the fields of high-dimensional geometry and probability/information theory.

Among other things, he and his collaborators established an analogue of the Second Law of Thermodynamics for the Central Limit Theorem of probability, thereby solving a problem that had been open since the 1950s.

He is also the author of Strange Curves, Counting Rabbits, & Other Mathematical Explorations, a popular school mathematics book, published by Princeton University Press.

Professor Ball was awarded a Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society in 1992 and held a Royal Society Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship from 2003 to 2004.

He is married to Sachiko Kusukawa, an early modern historian.