HKIAS Senior Fellow Professor Sir John Ball elected new President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

10 November 2021

Professor Sir John Ball, newly elected President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh

Professor Sir John Ball, HKIAS Senior Fellow and a Professor at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK, was newly elected to the role of President of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE). The appointment was announced at the RSE Annual Statutory Meeting in October 2021. Professor Sir John Ball takes office in April 2022.

Responding to his selection, Professor Sir John Ball said, “The Royal Society of Edinburgh, with its long history and tradition, is one of the great institutions of Scotland, and it plays a vital role both in supporting intellectual life and providing expert and impartial advice to society at large. To be elected President is both an honour and a challenge, and I look forward to working with the Fellows and professional staff of the Society as it moves forward.”

Professor Sir John Ball’s main research areas lie in the calculus of variations, nonlinear partial differential equations, infinite-dimensional dynamical systems and their applications to nonlinear mechanics. For his wide-ranging work in applied mathematics and contributions to the scientific community, Professor Sir John Ball has won numerous prizes and honours, including the 2018 Leonardo da Vinci award of the European Academy of Sciences, the 2018 King Faisal Prize for Science and the 2012 John von Neumann Lecture and Prize of SIAM. In addition, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Royal Society of London and Institute for Mathematics and its Applications; a Member of the Academia Europaea; a Foreign Member of the French Academy of Sciences. He was conferred the knighthood in 2006 “for his services in science”.

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE), Scotland’s National Academy was established in 1783 for “the advancement of learning and useful knowledge”.