Iain Gordon
British mathematician
Iain Gordon, FRSE, is a mathematician, who is currently Professor of Mathematics, Vice-Principal and Head of the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. From the beginning of August 2026 he will take up a new position as Senior Vice-Principal at the University of Glasgow. His field of specialisation is representation theory and noncommutative algebra.
Education and career
Gordon studied mathematics as an undergraduate at the University of Bristol (1991–94), took Part III at Magdalene College, the University of Cambridge (1994–95), and completed his PhD on Representations of Quantised Function Algebras at Roots of Unity at the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Ken Brown (1995–1998). He was the Seggie Brown Fellow Archived 31 July 2021 at the Wayback Machine in Edinburgh (1998–99) and a postdoc at the Bielefeld University, the University of Antwerp and MSRI (1999–2000). He was a lecturer and then reader in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Glasgow (2000–2006), and since then has been the Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.
In 2005, Gordon was awarded the Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society for his article Baby Verma modules for rational Cherednik algebras. In 2008 he was awarded a 5-year EPSRC Leadership Fellowship to support his research on Rigid Structure in Noncommutative, Geometric and Combinatorial Problems. In 2010 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad on Rational Cherednik Algebras. In 2014 he won the Edinburgh University Student Association's Van Heyningen Award for Teaching in Science and Engineering.
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