page_title: Michael Atiyah
hierarchical_section_title: Michael Atiyah
caption_attribution_description: Michael Francis Atiyah
context_page_description: Sir Michael Francis Atiyah OM FRS FRSE FMedSci FAA FREng was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry.
  Atiyah grew up in Sudan and Egypt but spent most of his academic life in the United Kingdom at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was the President of the Royal Society, founding director of the Isaac Newton Institute, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, chancellor of the University of Leicester, and the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. From 1997 until his death, he was an honorary professor in the University of Edinburgh.
  Atiyah's mathematical collaborators 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. His best known result, the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, was proved with Singer in 1963 and is used in counting the number of independent solutions to differential equations.
context_section_description: Sir Michael Francis Atiyah OM FRS FRSE FMedSci FAA FREng (/əˈtiːə/; 22 April 1929 – 11 January 2019) was a British-Lebanese mathematician specialising in geometry.
  Atiyah grew up in Sudan and Egypt but spent most of his academic life in the United Kingdom at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge and in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was the President of the Royal Society (1990–1995), founding director of the Isaac Newton Institute (1990–1996), master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990–1997), chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995–2005), and the President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005–2008). From 1997 until his death, he was an honorary professor in the University of Edinburgh.
  Atiyah's mathematical collaborators 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. His best known result, the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, was proved with Singer in 1963 and is 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 and the Abel Prize in 2004.
caption: Michael Atiyah in 2007
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