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arXiv · 2009.06736

Exploring the toolkit of Jean Bourgain

Terence Tao
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Abstract

Gian-Carlo Rota once asserted that "every mathematician only has a few tricks". The sheer breadth and ingenuity in the work of Jean Bourgain may at first glance appear to be a counterexample to this maxim. However, as we hope to illustrate in this article, even Bourgain relied frequently on a core set of tools, which formed the base from which problems in many disparate mathematical fields could then be attacked. We discuss a selected number of these tools here, and then perform a case study of how an argument in one of Bourgain's papers can be interpreted as a sequential application of several of these tools.

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Terence Tao. 2020-09-14. Exploring the toolkit of Jean Bourgain. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.06736

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