The speaker for the 2018 Weierstrass Lecture is Sir William Timothy Gowers, winner of the Fields Medal. Professor Gowers studied mathematics at Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in 1990 under Béla Bollobás. He was then a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, and from 1991 to 1995 a Lecturer at University College, London. He then returned to Cambridge, where he was appointed Rouse Ball Professor in 1998.

Professor Gowers, who won a gold medal at the 1981 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), initially worked in the field of Banach spaces and later turned to combinatorics and combinatorial number theory. For his pioneering work in functional analysis and combinatorics, he was awarded the European Mathematical Society Prize in 1996 and the Fields Medal in 1998. He became a member of the Royal Society in 1999 and was honoured in 2012 for his services to mathematics.