Richard Borcherds - Personal Life

Personal Life

Borcherds was born in Cape Town, but the family moved to Birmingham in the United Kingdom when he was six months old. His father is a physicist and he has three brothers, two of whom are mathematics teachers. He was a promising mathematician and chess player as a child, winning several national mathematics championships and "was in line for becoming a chess master" before giving up after coming to believe that the higher levels of competitive chess are merely about the competition rather than the fun of playing. He was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied under John Horton Conway. After receiving his doctorate in 1985 he 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. From 1996 he held a Royal Society Research Professorship at Cambridge before returning to Berkeley in 1999 as Professor of mathematics.

An interview with Simon Singh for the Guardian, in which Borcherds suggested he might have some traits associated with Asperger syndrome, subsequently led to a chapter about him in a book on autism by Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen concluded that while Borcherds had many autistic traits, he did not merit a formal diagnosis of Asperger syndrome.