Michael Francis Atiyah
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Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, OM (born 22 April 1929) is a mathematician who was born in London. His mother was Scottish, his father Lebanese. He was brought up mostly in Cairo, Egypt and the Sudan. He later went to Manchester Grammar School and then the University of Cambridge. He was a student of W. V. D. Hodge, in Cambridge.
Atiyah has also been professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Atiyah rejuvenated British mathematics during his years at Oxford and Cambridge. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge and became its first director. Atiyah is now retired and an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh and Chancellor of the University of Leicester.
He was one of the founders, with Friedrich Hirzebruch, of topological K-theory, a branch of algebraic topology. He has collaborated with many other mathematicians, for example with Raoul Bott and Isadore Singer on the developments leading to the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. This led to work in representation theory, and on the heat equation on manifolds. He later turned to an interest in gauge field theories, paving the way for the work of others such as Witten.
In 1966, when he was 37 years old, he was awarded the Fields Medal, and in 2004 he won the Abel Prize together with Isadore Singer.
Atiyah's many students include such illustrious mathematics as Simon Donaldson and Nigel Hitchin.
He has been president of the Royal Society, and master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He has received the Royal Medal of the Royal Society in 1968 and its Copley Medal in 1988.
Atiyah has served as president of the London Mathematical Society (1974 - 1976). He has also played an important role in the shaping of today’s European Mathematical Society (EMS).
He has served as president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Atiyah was responsible for the founding of the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, a global network of the world's scientific academies which aims to help its member academies to shape public policy in areas related to science. Atiyah also instigated the formation of the Association of European Academies (ALLEA).
Among the prizes he has received are the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (1981) and the King Faisal International Prize for Science (1987). Michael Francis Atiyah was knighted in 1983 and made a member of the Order of Merit in 1992.
External link
- Atiyah biography (http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Atiyah.html)