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John Ball is Sedleian Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Fellow of The Queen's College. Before this he was Professor of Applied Analysis at Heriot-Watt University from 1982-1996. He took an undergraduate degree in Mathematics at Cambridge, and obtained a D.Phil. in 1972 at the University of Sussex under the direction of David Edmunds.

He moved to Heriot-Watt in 1972 on an SRC postdoctoral fellowship which enabled him to spend an extended period at Brown University, where he began work on the existence of solutions to the equilibrium equations of nonlinear elasticity, as well as furthering his interest in infinite-dimensional dynamical systems. The recipient from 1980-85 of an SERC Senior Fellowship, he has held Visiting Professorships at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris,  at the Tata  Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and  at the University of Montpellier II.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1980, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1989, and an Associé Etranger of the Académie des Sciences in 2000. Other awards include the 1981 Whittaker Prize of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, Honorary Doctorates from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Montpellier II, and the University of Sussex, the 1990 Keith Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the 1995 Naylor Prize in Applied Mathematics of the London Mathematical Society,  the 1999 Theodore Von Karman Prize of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the 2003 David Crighton Medal of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the London Mathematical Society . He was a Council Member of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council  from 1994-1999, President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society from 1989-90, and of the London Mathematical Society from 1996-1998.  He is currently President of the International Mathematical Union.
 

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