William Beckner earned his Ph.D. in mathematics at Princeton University. He is professor of mathematics and serves as the Oden Institute’s Assistant Director for Natural Sciences and on the Oden Institute’s Advisory Board. He holds the Paul V. Montgomery Professorship in Mathematics.

Dr. Beckner’s research is directed at proving and using geometric inequalities to gain insight into the structure of manifolds, to understand how geometric information is encoded in sharp embedding estimates and to use asymptotic arguments to identify invariants that characterize large-scale geometric structure. Such results have useful applications for fluid dynamics, quantum physics, information theory, statistical mechanics, turbulence, and stellar dynamics.

His current research topics include Fourier analysis, geometric inequalities, Lie groups and differential geometry, mathematical physics, partial differential equations, and probability. He is a past managing editor for the “Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.” He served as chair of the Mathematics Department from 2007 to 2011.

For his work on fundamental inequalities in Fourier analysis, he was awarded the Prix Salem. He has held a Sloan Fellowship, and gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki.