Professor Richard Thomas
DPhil, FRS
Honorary Fellow
Royal Society Research Professor (Pure Mathematics)
Richard Thomas was a Junior Research Fellow at Hertford College from 1997 to 2000 (on leave in Princeton in 1997–98 and Harvard 1999–2000), acting as pure maths tutor during 1998–99 while Dr Brian Steer was on sabbatical. He is now a Royal Society research professor at Imperial College London.
Richard did his DPhil in Oxford, supervised by Sir Simon Donaldson FRS, from 1994 to 1997. Together they defined what are now known as ‘Donaldson-Thomas invariants’, which have become a big topic in both mathematics and theoretical physics. He studies the geometry of the high-dimensional curved spaces used in string theory to describe possible models for a ‘grand unified theory of physics’.
Together with Soheyla Feyzbakhsh, he was awarded the 2025 Osvald Veblen Prize of the American Mathematical Society – the leading international prize in geometry – for their joint work showing that Donaldson-Thomas theory can be solved in terms of its simplest ‘abelian’ version which counts curves in the geometric space under study. He has also been elected a fellow of the Royal Society (2015), the American Mathematical Society (2018) and Academia Europaea (2019), and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2010).