Another was understanding the Jones (V. F. R. Jones, FRS 1990) polynomial of a knot via quantum field theory. Figure 2. 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. ), Its origins lie again in the osmosis of concepts from algebraic geometry into topology. The metric is then used to study the scattering of two monopoles, using a suggestion of N. Manton that the geodesic flow on the moduli space is the low energy approximation to the scattering. Dr. Atiyah, a relatively short and jolly man who had gone mostly bald as a young man, was renowned for his energy and a commanding voice, most notably in his lectures.
With Juan Maldacena and Cumrun Vafa,[115] and E. Witten[116] he described the dynamics of M-theory on manifolds with G2 holonomy.
Lily’s reminiscences of childhood with her sisters revealed fun-filled times not without a certain degree of mischievousness. Newly wed to mathematician Lily Brown, who gave up her position at Bedford College London to join him in Princeton, Atiyah spent 1955–56 in the exhilarating company of many of the world’s most accomplished young mathematicians. Earlier, as president of the Royal Society (1990-1995), he publicly criticized the British nuclear program, arguing that it was a dangerous waste of scientific resources. Partially this was for family reasons—Lily was unable to teach in America, and they decided that they preferred a British education for the children. Some of the motivating examples included the Riemann–Roch theorem and its generalization the Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem, and the Hirzebruch signature theorem. Green's functions for linear partial differential equations can often be found by using the Fourier transform to convert this into an algebraic problem. The Atiyah–Singer index theorem is Michael's best known result. The main thrust of his argument was that ‘the insistence on a UK nuclear capability was fundamentally misguided, a total waste of resources and a significant factor in our relative economic decline over the past 50 years’. His time at the Royal Society of London served as ‘a good apprenticeship’, as he commented when elected to the position. This busy life, to and fro between Cambridge and London, left little time for mathematical research. Finally, he became its president from 2005 until 2008. Membre de la Royal Society depuis 1962, il en a été président de 1990 à 1995.
She was the oldest of three sisters, whose father was a dockworker at the Rosyth naval dockyard and whose mother stayed at home to care for the girls. It is more convenient to classify instantons on a sphere as this is compact, and this is essentially equivalent to classifying instantons on Euclidean space as this is conformally equivalent to a sphere and the equations for instantons are conformally invariant. Atiyah and Bott[98] showed that this could be deduced from a more general formula in equivariant cohomology, which was a consequence of well-known localization theorems.