Richard Borcherds

Early life and education Borcherds was born in Cape Town, South Africa, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old. He attended university at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway.

Career After receiving his doctorate in 1985, Borcherds has held various alternating positions at Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, serving as Morrey assistant professor of mathematics at Berkeley from 1987 to 1988. He was a Royal Society University Research Fellow.

Autism

An interview with Simon Singh for The Guardian, in which Borcherds suggested he might have some sort of traits possibly associated with Asperger syndrome, led to a chapter about him in a book on autism by Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen insinuated that while Borcherds may have had autistic traits, he did not meet a formal diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome. In 1998 at the 23rd International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin, Germany he received the Fields Medal together with Maxim Kontsevich, William Timothy Gowers and Curtis T. McMullen. and the discovery of a new class of automorphic infinite products." In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.