Michael Francis Atiyah is a British mathematician specialising in geometry. He grew up in Sudan and Egypt and spent most of his academic life in the United Kingdom at Oxford and Cambridge, and in the United States at the Institute for Advanced Study. His mathematical collaborators include Raoul Bott, Friedrich Hirsebruch and Isadore Singer. Together with Hirzebruch, he laid the foundations for topological K-theory, an important tool in algebraic topology, which, informally speaking, describes ways in which spaces can be twisted. His best known result, the Atiyah-Singer index theorem, was proved with Singer in 1963 and is widely used in counting the number of independent solutions to differential equations. 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. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966, the Copley Medal in 1988, and the Abel Prize in 2004.
I got to know Micheal Atiyah in my second year in university.At that time I was reading a book on commutative algebra written by Atiyah. His book is really a good book ,which is brief but really contains all the useful ideas and techniques in commutative algebra.From that time,I began to know this great mathematician.I heard a lot of stories about him.He is really famous for his omnipotence in all branches in mathematics.He has a good point of view over the whole mathematics.He also made a prediction on the development of modern mathematics.
This November he went to Nankai University in China.It's really a pity that I was not in China and could not go and see him.I hope I can see the real Atiyah someday~~~
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