Awards & Winners

Michael Atiyah

Date of Birth 22-April-1929
Place of Birth Hampstead
(London, England, United Kingdom)
Nationality United Kingdom, Lebanon
Also know as Sir Michael Atiyah, Michael Francis Atiyah
Profession Mathematician
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, OM, FRS, FRSE, FAA is a British mathematician specialising in geometry. Atiyah grew up in Sudan and Egypt and spent most of his academic life in the United Kingdom at Oxford and Cambridge, and in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study. He has been president of the Royal Society, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, chancellor of the University of Leicester, and president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Since 1997, he has been an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh. Atiyah's mathematical collaborators include Raoul Bott, Friedrich Hirzebruch and Isadore Singer, and his students include Graeme Segal, Nigel Hitchin and Simon Donaldson. Together with Hirzebruch, he laid the foundations for topological K-theory, an important tool in algebraic topology, which, informally speaking, describes ways in which spaces can be twisted. His best known result, the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, was proved with Singer in 1963 and is widely used in counting the number of independent solutions to differential equations. Some of his more recent work was inspired by theoretical physics, in particular instantons and monopoles, which are responsible for some subtle corrections in quantum field theory. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966, the Copley Medal in 1988, and the Abel Prize in 2004.

Awards by Michael Atiyah

Check all the awards nominated and won by Michael Atiyah.

2004


Abel Prize
(For their discovery and proof of the index theorem, bringing together topology, geometry and analysis, and their outstanding role in building new bridges between mathematics and theoretical physics.)

1988


Copley Medal
(In recognition of his fundamental contributions to a wide range of topics in geometry, topology, analysis and theoretical physics.)

1966


Fields Medal
(For his work in developing K-theory, a generalized Lefschetz fixed-point theorem and the Atiyah\u2013Singer theorem.)