Richard Borcherds (born 1959) is a British-American mathematician currently working on the quantum field theory. He is known in particular for his work with lattices, number theory, group theory, and infinite-dimensional algebras. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1998. As a child he was also a fantastic chess player but later gave up chess because of the too competitive environment. Borcherds revealed that he believes he has Asperger's Syndrome in an interview with Simon Singh for The Guardian. This is an excerpt about him from The High-Flying Obsessives: "Some work environments enable people with the syndrome to flourish. Richard Borcherds, professor of maths at Berkeley in California, was 38 and teaching at Cambridge when he won the Fields medal - the equivalent of the maths Nobel prize. He suspected he might have autism after reading an article about it when he was in his 30s and recognised many of its symptoms in himself. Borcherds, who describes himself as 'socially inept', knew Baron-Cohen, who assessed him for a study of Asperger high-flyers and diagnosed that he did indeed have AS." In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society and in 2014 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Read more about his amazing career and the many awards he has won here.