Rate My Professor Jack Thorne

Professor Jack Thorne serves as the Kuwait Professor of Number Theory and Algebra in the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow of Trinity College. He completed his undergraduate studies with a BA at the University of Cambridge and obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 2012, with a thesis addressing questions in the Langlands programme and arithmetic statistics. Following his doctorate, Thorne held a Clay Research Fellowship from 2012 to 2017 and positions at Harvard University before returning to Cambridge in 2014 as Professor of Number Theory. He joined Trinity College as a Teaching Fellow in 2021 and subsequently became a Fellow there.

Thorne's research centers on number theory, particularly its interactions with representation theory, algebra, and automorphic forms, exploring the role of symmetry in solving equations. His transformative contributions to algebraic number theory include proofs of new cases of functoriality for holomorphic modular forms; the modularity of elliptic curves over any layer of the cyclotomic tower; the existence of Galois representations associated to regular algebraic automorphic forms; and potential automorphy for local systems on curves over finite fields. In collaboration with James Newton, he established symmetric power functoriality for holomorphic modular forms, yielding fundamental results on L-functions connected to Ramanujan's Delta function and sums of squares problems, advancing the Langlands programme by linking Diophantine equations to geometric and analytic objects. Thorne's honors encompass the Clay Research Fellowship, LMS Whitehead Prize (2017), SASTRA Ramanujan Prize (2018), New Horizons in Mathematics Prize (2022), election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (2020), and Fellowship in the first cohort of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. He presented an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018 and supervises and lectures on Part II Number Theory and graduate quadratic forms in the Cambridge Tripos.