ATIYAH, MICHAEL FRANCIS

born April 22, 1929, London, Eng. British mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 primarily for his work in topology. Atiyah received a knighthood in 1983 and the Order of Merit in 1992. He also served as president of the Royal Society (199095). Atiyah attended Victoria College in Egypt and Trinity College, Cambridge, Eng. (Ph.D., 1955). He held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., U.S., and at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford before becoming master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, in 1990; he retired from the latter in 1996. Atiyah was awarded the Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow in 1966. He was one of the pioneers, along with Alexandre Grothendieck and Friedrich Hirzebruch, in the development of K-theoryculminating in 1963 in the famous Atiyah-Singer index theorem, a powerful generalization of the Riemann-Roch theorem. His early work in topology and algebraoften in collaboration with Raoul Bott, Hirzebruch, or Isadore Singerwas followed by work in a number of different fields, a phenomenon regularly observed in Fields Medalists. He contributed, along with others, to the development of the theory of complex manifoldsi.e., generalizations of Riemann surfaces to several variables. He went back in history to resurrect William Hamilton's almost forgotten work on quaternions and to relate it, through applications of algebraic topology, algebraic varieties, complex analysis, and more, to string theory in mathematical physics. Atiyah's publications include K-theory (1967); with I.G. Macdonald, Introduction to Commutative Algebra (1969); Elliptic Operators and Compact Groups (1974); Geometry of Yang-Mills Fields (1979); with Nigel Hitchin, The Geometry and Dynamics of Magnetic Monopoles (1988); and The Geometry and Physics of Knots (1990). His Collected Works, in five volumes, appeared in 1988.