Sir Michael Atiyah, British mathematician, Died at 89

Sir Michael Francis Atiyah was born on April 22, 1929, and died on January 11, 2019.

 

He was a British-Lebanese mathematician specializing in geometry.

He was raised in Sudan and Egypt but spent most of his learning life in the United Kingdom at University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, and in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study.

He served as the President of the Royal Society (1990–1995), master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990 to 1997), chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995–2005), and the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005–2008). 

From 1997 until his death, Atiyah was an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.

His mathematical joint works included Raoul Bott, Friedrich Hirzebruch and Isadore Singer, and his students included 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. 

Sir Michael Atiyah was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004. 

Sir Michael Atiyah passed away at 89 years old.