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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, an Associé Etranger of the Académie des Sciences in 2000, a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications in 2003, a Foreign Member of the Istituto Lombardo in 2005, a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2007,  a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2008, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012. Other awards include the 1981 Whittaker Prize of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, 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, the 2003 David Crighton Medal of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications and the London Mathematical Society, the 2006 Royal Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the 2009 Sylvester Medal of the Royal Society, the 2012 John von Neumann Lecture and Prize of SIAM, Honorary Fellowship of St John’s College, Cambridge in 2005, .Honorary Membership of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society in 2008, and Honorary Doctorates from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Montpellier II,   the University of Sussex, the University of Edinburgh and the Université Pierre et Marie Curie . 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 and in 2009, and President of the International Mathematical Union from 2003-06. 

He is currently a member of the Executive Board of the International Council for Science. 

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