Azure, a plate hugging three unequal roundels of the Field, kissing pairwise.
Motto: In Spem Contra Spem.
("In Hope against Hope.")
Crest: Dragon-slaying
Archangel Michael Or.
Supporters: Two lions Argent.
The essential part is the center where you see four mutually tangent circles that generate a so-called Apollonian circle packing (named after Apollonius of Perga, 2nd century B.C.). Such a packing is a fractal set in the plane, which one obtains if one keeps removing from the curvilinear triangles the tangent discs. In the Renaissance, these configurations were a subject of study for the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes and later, in the twentieth century, for Frederick Soddy, who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soddy discovered the integral Apollonian packings (IACP) where the reciprocals of the radii are integers, for all circles in the packing. The theory of these IACP is today a rich mathematical research area, at the interface of hyperbolic geometry, dynamics, and number theory.
Jean Bourgain was born on 28 February 1954 in Ostend, Belgium. In 1975, he received a Belgium Research Fellowship which supported him until 1981. He earned a doctorate in 1977 from the Free University of Brussels (VUB) under Freddy Delbaen. In 1979, Bourgain received his Habilitation and was awarded the Alumni Prize from the Belgium NSF.
From 1981 to 1985, he was a professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
From 1985 to 1995, Bourgain was professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES). Also, from 1985 to 2006, he was J. L. Doob Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois.
In 1994, Jean Bourgain received the Fields Medal and joined the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ (he is now IBM von Neumann Professor in the School of Mathematics).
In 2012, he and Terry Tao received the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2016, Jean Bourgain was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize.
Finally, in December 2016, Baron Jean Bourgain was awarded the 2017 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 64 (on 2018-12-22, at the Imelda Hospital in Bonheiden near Brussels, Belgium).
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