George Willis

George A. Willis FAA (born 10 November 1954) is an Australian mathematician. Willis received BSc and BSc (Hons) degrees in mathematics from the University of Adelaide (1977), and a doctorate from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1981) under the supervision of Professor B. E. Johnson. He is currently emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Newcastle (Australia). a "whole new insight" into the structure and classification of totally disconnected locally compact groups.

In October 2014 an Arbeitsgemeinschaft was held in Oberwolfach dedicated to research on totally disconnected groups. Willis showed that factorisation in Banach and group algebra is possible in cases when the Cohen factorisation theorem does not apply, and decisively closed the argument using negative counterexamples. Willis and Yehuda Shalom co-authored a paper that answered the conjecture of Margulis and Zimmer for a broad class of groups, and provided a unified framework for considering a number of results and conjectures in the rigidity theory of arithmetic groups. This paper won Willis the 2016 Gavin Brown Prize. Willis and Udo Baumgartner began describing contraction groups in 2004, by proving the theorem that if the scale is not 1 then the contraction subgroup is not trivial.

Willis and Helge Glöckner, in the culmination of almost 20 years of work, arrived at a complete description of the closed contraction groups.

Awards, honours, and memberships Willis is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, and a member of the Australian Mathematical Society, American Mathematical Society, and the London Mathematical Society.

Thomas Ranken Lyle Medal, 2025 George Szekeres Medal, 2023 Humboldt Research Award, 2023 Invited plenary speaker, International Congress of Mathematicians, 2022 Australian Laureate Fellowship (Australian Research Council) 2017 Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales 2018 Gavin Brown Prize (Australian Mathematical Society) 2016 Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science 2014 Invited plenary speaker, Australian Mathematical Society Annual Meeting 2011 Professorial Fellow (Australian Research Council) 2009 Invited speaker, British Mathematical Colloquium 2003

Notable publications