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Michael Francis Atiyah

Born: 22 April 1929
Michael Atiyah's father, Edward Selim Atiyah (1903-1964), was Lebanese and
his mother, Jean Levens, was Scottish. Edward, whose father was a medical
doctor in Khartoum, had been educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and
became a civil servant in Khartoum. He was also an author and set up a radio
broadcasting service during World War II. He was a strong supporter of the
Palestinian cause. Michael Atiyah, when interviewed in [32], spoke about his
father:My father's main dream was to go to Oxford. He wanted to convert
himself into an Englishman. It didn't quite work out. When he came
back to Sudan, he found he wasn't part of the English class structure,
he was regarded as one of the lower classes, although he was Oxfordeducated and regarded himself as culturally English. That turned him
over a bit. He became an Arab nationalist to some extent. All his life
was divided between wanting passionately to be English and yet
sympathising with the Arab political position within the British
empire.
Michael's mother Jean, although of Scottish descent, was the daughter of a
minister of a church in Yorkshire. She lived in Oxford and had studied at the
university there. It was in Oxford that Edward and Jean met. They had four
children, three sons Michael (the eldest and subject of this biography), Patrick
Selim (born 5 March 1931, who went on to become an English lawyer and
academic) and Joseph (known as Joe, the youngest of the four children who
after a mathematics degree from Cambridge University, became a computer
scientist working in computer software and telecommunications), and a
daughter Selma (who studied English at an American University and lives in
America). Although he was born in London, Michael grew up in Khartoum.
However, to avoid the summer heat there the family usually returned to
England at that time. Michael's primary school education was at the Diocesan
school in Khartoum which he entered in 1934 at the age of ve. He completed
his primary education in 1941 and the family, as usual, returned to England.
Lebanon had been controlled by the French and, after the fall of France in
1940, it came under the control of the Vichy government. After their trip to
England, the Atiyah family returned to Lebanon via France in 1941 and Michael
returned to a French school. However, just after this began, the British and
Free French began ghting to gain control of the Lebanon. Michael was sent to

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Victoria College in Cairo. This was a boarding school modelled on the English
boarding school system and it was a school that Edward Atiyah had attended.
Atiyah writes in the autobiography [3]:At Victoria College I got a good basic education but had to adapt to
being two years younger than most others in my class. I survived by
helping bigger boys with their homework and so was protected by
them from the inevitable bullying of a boarding school.
Atiyah talked in [35] about how he came to chose mathematics:I was always interested in mathematics from a very young age. ... My
parents always thought that I was cut out to be a mathematician from
a very young age, all the way through. ... But there was a stage [at
Victoria College in Cairo] when I got very interested in chemistry, and
I thought that would be a great thing; after about a year of advanced
chemistry I decided that it wasn't what I wanted to do and I went back
to mathematics. I never seriously considered doing anything else.
He gave a somewhat fuller description of his decision between chemistry and
mathematics in the interview. He said that it was inorganic chemistry that put
him o the subject [15]:It was how to make sulphuric acid and all that sort of stu. Lists of
facts, just facts, you had to memorize a vast amount of material.
Organic chemistry was more interesting, there was a bit of structure
to it. But inorganic chemistry was just a mountain of facts in books
like this. It's true that in mathematics you don't really need an
enormous memory. You can work most things out for yourself,
remember a few principles. If you're good at that, then it comes easily.
If you want to do other things, you've got to work hard to learn a lot of
facts. There was one reason, I think. But I enjoyed thinking, I'm good
at it, and will continue with it.
After the war ended in 1945, Edward Atiyah returned to live permanently in
England. Michael Atiyah attended Manchester Grammar School, one of the best
schools for mathematics in the country. Although he was only sixteen years old,
he had already taken his A-level examinations having been two years ahead of
his age groups in Victoria College, Cairo. His two years at Manchester Grammar
School were spent training to take the Cambridge scholarship examinations.
However, it was at this school that he came to love geometry [3]:I found that I had to work very hard to keep up with the class and the
competition was sti. We had an old-fashioned but inspiring teacher
who had graduated from Oxford in 1912 and from him I acquired a
love of projective geometry, with its elegant synthetic proofs, which
has never left me. I became, and remained, primarily a geometer
though that word has been reinterpreted in dierent ways at dierent
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levels. I was also introduced to Hamilton's work on quarternions,

whose beauty fascinated me, and still does.
He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1947. However, rather
than go straight to university, which was an option, he decided to do his
two-years National Service, which was compulsory at the time. He served as a
clerical ocer and took the opportunity to read mathematics books and articles.
He read Hardy and Wright's Number Theory at this time and also read articles
on group theory. He was granted special permission to cut short the nal year
of his military service and spend it at Cambridge. There he played a lot of tennis
and avidly studied mathematics on his own in the library. He matriculated at
Trinity College in the autumn of 1949. Many of his fellow students had decided
to postpone their National Service, so Atiyah was one of the older of the
students in his year. With his exceptional talent, his extra maturity, and the
studying he had done before starting his course, it is not at all surprising that
he came out ranked rst despite having many very talented fellow students.
While still an undergraduate, he wrote his rst paper A note on the tangents of
a twisted cubic (1952).
After graduating with his BA in 1952, Atiyah continued to undertake research at
Trinity College, Cambridge obtaining his doctorate in 1955 with his thesis Some
Applications of Topological Methods in Algebraic Geometry. His thesis advisor
was William V D Hodge. Speaking of the work for his thesis, Atiyah said [35]:I'd come up to Cambridge at a time when the emphasis in geometry
was on classical projective algebraic geometry of the old-fashioned
type, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I would have gone on working in
that area except that Hodge represented a more modern point of view
- dierential geometry in relation to topology; I recognized that. It
was a very important decision for me. I could have worked in more
traditional things, but I think that it was a wise choice, and by
working with him I got much more involved with modern ideas. He
gave me good advice and at one stage we collaborated together. There
was some recent work in France at the time on sheaf theory. I got
interested in it, he got interested in it, and we worked together and
wrote a joint paper which was part of my thesis. That was very
benecial for me.
Atiyah published two joint papers with his thesis advisor William Hodge, Formes
de seconde espce sur une varit algbrique (1954) and Integrals of the
second kind on an algebraic variety (1955). He also published the single author
papers Complex bre bundles and ruled surfaces (1955). He was made a fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1954. He married Lily Brown on 30 July 1955;
they had three sons John, David and Robin. Lily, born in Edinburgh in 1928, was
the daughter of a dock worker at the Rosyth naval yard. She had studied
mathematics rst at the University of Edinburgh and then took the Cambridge
Tripos. She went on to obtain a doctorate, working under Mary Cartwright. Lily

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had met Michael Atiyah at Cambridge but, by the time they married, she was a
lecturer at Bedford College, London. Atiyah was awarded a Commonwealth
Fellow to study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during session
1955-56. Lily had to decide whether to keep her job at Bedford College or go to
Princeton with her husband. She chose to go to Princeton with her husband and
resigned her position at Bedford College. This was an important year for Atiyah
who met, among others, Jean-Pierre Serre, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Kunihiko
Kodaira, Donald Spencer, Raoul Bott and Isadore Singer. Returning to
Cambridge, he was a college lecturer from 1957 and a Fellow of Pembroke
College from 1958. He remained at Cambridge until 1961 when he moved to a
readership at the University of Oxford where he became a Fellow of St
Catherine's College.
Atiyah was soon to ll the highly prestigious Savilian Chair of Geometry at
Oxford from 1963, holding this chair until 1969 when he was appointed
professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After
three years in Princeton, Atiyah returned to England, becoming a Royal Society
Research Professor at Oxford. He was also elected a Fellow of St Catherine's
College, Oxford. Oxford was to remain Atiyah's base until 1990 when he became
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge and Director of the newly opened Isaac
Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge.
Atiyah showed how the study of vector bundles on spaces could be regarded as
the study of cohomology theory, called K-theory. Grothendieck also contributed
substantially to the development of K-theory. In [13] Atiyah's early mathematical
work is described as follows:Michael Atiyah has contributed to a wide range of topics in
mathematics centring around the interaction between geometry and
analysis. His rst major contribution (in collaboration with F
Hirzebruch) was the development of a new and powerful technique in
topology (K-theory) which led to the solution of many outstanding
dicult problems. Subsequently (in collaboration with I M Singer) he
established an important theorem dealing with the number of
solutions of elliptic dierential equations. This 'index theorem' had
antecedents in algebraic geometry and led to important new links
between dierential geometry, topology and analysis. Combined with
considerations of symmetry it led (jointly with Raoul Bott) to a new
and rened 'xed point theorem' with wide applicability.
For these early achievements Atiyah was awarded a Fields Medal at the
International Congress at Moscow in 1966. An address concerning Atiyah's
contributions was given at the Congress by Henri Cartan, see [18]. The K-theory
and the index theorem are studied in Atiyah's book K-theory (1967, reprinted
1989) and his joint work with G B Segal, The Index of Elliptic Operators I-V, in
the Annals of Mathematics, volumes 88 and 93 (1968, 1971). Atiyah also
described his work on the index theorem in The index of elliptic operators given

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as an American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lecture in 1973.

The ideas which led to Atiyah being awarded a Fields Medal were later seen to
be relevant to gauge theories of elementary particles. Again we quote [13]:The index theorem could be interpreted in terms of quantum theory
and has proved a useful tool for theoretical physicists. Beyond these
linear problems, gauge theories involved deep and interesting
nonlinear dierential equations. In particular, the Yang-Mills
equations have turned out to be particularly fruitful for
mathematicians. Atiyah initiated much of the early work in this eld
and his student Simon Donaldson went on to make spectacular use of
these ideas in 4-dimensional geometry. More recently Atiyah has been
inuential in stressing the role of topology in quantum eld theory
and in bringing the work of theoretical physicists, notably E Witten, to
the attention of the mathematical community.
The theories of superspace and supergravity and the string theory of
fundamental particles, which involves the theory of Riemann surfaces in novel
and unexpected ways, were all areas of theoretical physics which developed
using the ideas which Atiyah was introducing.
Atiyah has published a number of highly inuential books: K-theory (1967);
(with I G Macdonald) Introduction to commutative algebra (1969); Vector elds
on manifolds (1970); Elliptic operators and compact groups (1974); Geometry
on Yang-Mills elds (1979); (with N J Hitchin) The geometry and dynamics of
magnetic monopoles (1988); The geometry and physics of knots (1990); (Video)
The mysteries of space (1992); Siamo tutti Matematici (2007); and Edinburgh
Lectures on Geometry, Analysis and Physics (2010).
Atiyah and John Tate described the Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize
Problems in a lecture in Paris on 24 May 2000. Atiyah's lecture covered the
Poincar conjecture, the Hodge conjecture, quantum Yang-Mills theory and the
Navier-Stokes equation. He explained the problems and placed them in their
historical context. He also discussed the implications for various elds of
mathematics and physics if solutions to these problems were found. A 60-minute
video of the lecture is available entitled The millennium prize problems.
Six volumes of Atiyah's Collected Works have been published. These contain a
commentary by Atiyah and in the Preface he comments on the practice of
publishing 'collected works' during the lifetime of their author:It appears to be increasingly fashionable to publish 'collected works'
long before the author's demise. There are several clear advantages to
all parties: posterity is saved the trouble of undertaking the collection,
while the author can add some personal touches by way of a
commentary. There are also disadvantages: the commentary will be
biased, and the author may feel that he is being pensioned o.
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Another important aspect of Atiyah's contribution is the remarkable collection

of doctoral students he supervised.
Atiyah has received many honours during his career, in addition to the Fields
Medal referred to above, and although we cannot list them all we will give a
fairly full account. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in
1962 at the age of 32. He received the Royal Medal of the Society in 1968 and
its Copley Medal in 1988. He gave the Royal Society's Bakerian Lecture on
Global geometry in 1975 and was President of the Royal Society from 1990 to
1995.
Among the prizes that he has received are the Feltrinelli Prize from the
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1981, the King Faisal International Prize for
Science in 1987, the Gunning Victoria Jubilee Prize from the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in 1990, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1993, the Jawaharlal Nehru
Memorial Medal in 1993, the Order of Andres Bello (1st Class) from the
Republic of Venezuela in 1997, the Royal Medal from the Royal Society of
Edinburgh in 2003, the Order of Merit (Gold) from the Lebanon in 2005, and the
President's Medal from the Institute of Physics in 2008. In 2004 Atiyah and
Isadore Singer were awarded the Neils Abel prize of 480 000 by the
Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters:... for their discovery and proof of the index theorem, bringing
together topology, geometry and analysis, and their outstanding role
in building new bridges between mathematics and theoretical physics.
They were presented with the prize by King Harald V of Norway at a ceremony
in Oslo.
Atiyah was the American Mathematical Society Colloquium Lecturer in 1973.
He was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1974-76 receiving its
De Morgan Medal in 1980. Atiyah was knighted in 1983 and made a member of
the Order of Merit in 1992.
He has been elected a foreign member of many national academies including:
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969), Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences (1972), German Academy of Scientist Leopoldina (1977), Acadmie
des Sciences, Paris (1978), United States National Academy of Sciences (1978),
Royal Irish Academy (1979), Third World Academy of Science (1983), Australian
Academy of Sciences (1992), Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1992), Indian
National Science Academy (1993), Russian Academy of Sciences (1994),
Georgian Academy of Sciences (1996), Academy of Physical, Mathematical and
Natural Sciences of Venezuela (1997), American Philosophical Society (1998),
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome (1999), Royal Norwegian Society of
Sciences and Letters (2001), Czechoslovakia Union of Mathematics (2001),
Moscow Mathematical Society (2001), Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences
(2002), Lebanese Academy of Sciences (2008), Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters (2009). He has been made an Honorary Fellow or Member of:
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Trinity College, University of Cambridge (1976), Pembroke College, University

of Cambridge (1983), Royal Institution (1991), St Catherine's College,
University of Oxford, (1991), Darwin College, University of Cambridge (1992),
Royal Academy of Engineering (1993), New College, University of Oxford
(1999), Faculty of Actuaries (1999), Academy of Medical Sciences (2000). Many
universities have awarded him an honorary degree including: Bonn (1968),
Warwick (1969), Durham (1979), St Andrews (1981), Trinity College Dublin
(1983), Chicago (1983), Edinburgh (1984), Cambridge (1984), Essex (1985),
London (1985), Sussex (1986), Ghent (1987), Reading (1990), Helsinki (1990),
Leicester (1991), Rutgers (1992), Salamanca (1992), Montreal (1993), Waterloo
(1993), Wales (1993), Queen's-Kingston (1994), Keele (1994), Birmingham
(1994), Open University (1995), Manchester (1996), Chinese University of Hong
Kong (1996), Brown University (1997), Oxford (1998), University of Wales
Swansea (1998), Charles University Prague (1998), Heriot-Watt University
(1999), University of Mexico (2001), American University of Beirut (2004), York
(2005), Harvard University (2006), Scuola Normale Pisa (2007), Universitat
Politcnica de Catalunya (2008).
Let us end this biography by recording the sad facts that Atiyah's eldest son
John died on 24 June 2002 while on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees with his
wife, while Jeremy, the youngest son of Atiyah's brother Patrick, died on 12
April 2006 while walking in Italy.
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
November 2014
MacTutor History of Mathematics
[http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Atiyah.html]

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