Rate My Professor George Willis

George Willis is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Computer and Information Sciences (Mathematics) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He obtained his Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the University of Adelaide, followed by a PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1981. His early career included postdoctoral fellowships at the University of New South Wales as Rothman's Postdoctoral Fellow, the University of Halifax as Killam Postdoctoral Fellow from 1983 to 1985, and the University of Adelaide as Queen Elizabeth II Fellow. He served as a lecturer at Flinders University from 1987, research fellow at the Australian National University from 1989, and lecturer at the University of Newcastle before joining full-time in 1992. He was appointed Professor in the School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, ARC Professorial Fellow from 2009 to 2015, and ARC Laureate Fellow in 2017. Willis has supervised 14 PhD students and served as Editor of the Journal of the Australian Mathematical Society from 2013.

A continuing theme in Willis's research is the interaction between algebra and topology. His early work in functional analysis included demonstrating in 1991 that the compact approximation property for Banach spaces does not imply the approximation property, resolving a 20-year open question. Since 1992, he has pioneered the structure theory of totally disconnected locally compact groups by introducing the notions of scale, tidy subgroups, and flatness, collectively known as 'Willis theory.' This work, surveyed in T. W. Palmer's Banach algebras and the general theory of *-algebras, Volume II (2001), offers original insights into a notoriously intractable subject and connects to ergodic theory, geometric group theory, arithmetic groups, number theory, harmonic analysis, and more. Key publications include the book Introduction to Banach Algebras, Operators, and Harmonic Analysis (2003, co-authored with Dales et al.), chapters such as A totally disconnected invitation to locally compact groups (2023, with Caprace) and Computational Aspects of Totally Disconnected Locally Compact Groups (2025, with Tornier and Ferov), and journal articles like Groups with Flat-Rank Greater Than 1 (2023) and Decomposition Theorems for Automorphism Groups of Trees (2021, with Carter). His contributions have earned him Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science (2014), the Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal (2025), George Szekeres Medal (2023), Humboldt Research Award (2023), and Gavin Brown Prize (2016). He has delivered plenary lectures at conferences including Banach Algebras 2007 and Locally compact groups beyond Lie theory (2013).