Michael Francis Atiyah
Sir Michael Francis Atiyah OM (born 22 April 1929) is a British mathematician. He was born in London. His mother was Scottish, his father Arab from a Lebanese background. He was brought up mostly in the Sudan. He later went to Manchester Grammar School and then the University of Cambridge.He was one of the founders, with Friedrich Hirzebruch, of topological K-theory, a branch of algebraic topology. He has collaborated with many other mathematicians, for example with Raoul Bott and Isadore Singer on the developments leading to the Atiyah-Singer index theorem. This led to work in representation theory, and on the heat equation on manifolds. He later turned to an interest in gauge field theories, paving the way for the work of others such as Witten.
In 1966, when he was 37 years old, he was awarded the Fields Medal, and in 2004 he won the Abel Prize together with Singer.
He has been president of the Royal Society, and master of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge.
He is the president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.