Affiliation:
1. School of Mathematics, Cardiff University, Senghennydd Road, Cardiff CF24 4AG, Wales, UK
Abstract
Vaughan Jones made fundamental contributions to mathematics and mathematical physics, bringing together disparate areas of operator algebras, knots, links and low-dimensional topology in mathematics, and statistical mechanics, quantum field theory and quantum information in physics, while opening up the new field of quantum topology. The key that unlocked all this was his seminal work on subfactor theory in von Neumann algebras of operators, which led to a new invariant of links: the Jones polynomial. For this he was awarded the Fields Medal in 1990.