Sir Michael Atiyah OM FRS (1929-2019)

Members of College will be saddened to hear of the death of Honorary Fellow Sir Michael Atiyah OM FRS, on Friday, 11 January 2019.

Sir Michael was one of the world's most distinguished mathematicians in the field of geometry; some would argue he was the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.  He won the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on K-theory, index theory and an analogue of the Lefschetz fixed-point formula for elliptic operators.

He was also awarded the Royal Medal (1968), Copley Medal (1988) and the Abel Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in mathematics (2004); and served as President of the Royal Society between 1990 and 1995. He was knighted in 1983 and appointed a member of the Order of Merit in 1992.

Although Sir Michael was an undergraduate and graduate student at Trinity College, his doctoral thesis, Some Applications of Topological Methods in Algebraic Geometry, was supervised by Pembroke Fellow (later Master) Sir William Hodge, who regarded him as his star pupil. Sir Michael’s own star pupil, Simon Donaldson (1976) won the Fields Medal in 1986.

Sir Michael was a Fellow of Pembroke from 1958 to 1961 and elected an Honorary Fellow in 1983.

After leaving Pembroke, Sir Michael was a Professor at Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge and collaborated with many notable mathematicians, including Raoul Bott, Isadore Singer and Friedrich Hirzebruch.

Sir Michael also held the positions of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990-1995) and Chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995-2005). The Mathematics building at Leicester is the Atiyah Building.

Image: Gert-Martin Greuel (https://opc.mfo.de/detail?photoID=10118)