Bulletin Spring‧Summer 1997

Sir Michael Atiyah, OM, FRS CITATION B o r n in London to an English mother and Lebanese father, thus perhaps inheriting a certain English pragmatism along with the mathematical traditions of the 'middle east' cultures, Michael Francis Atiyah progressed from schoolboy mathematics i n Egypt and then in that famous hothouse for young talent, Manchester Grammar School in England, to a first degree at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1952, a Ph.D. three years later, and, after four decades of mathematical thinking, almost 30 honorary degrees in recognition of his status as one of the great mathematicians of our century. He has therefore progressed from the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division -- deliberately confused with ambition, distraction, uglification and derision, by an Oxford mathematician, Lewis Carroll — to scale the highest peaks of the higher mathematics. He has, in fact, progressed into what must be, for most of us, the mysterious realm of mathematical, particularly geometrical, operations that, being by no means transparent, can only be made plain to an audience of other mathematicians. That audience is one made up of people of many different countries, speaking a host of different languages, who are able to grasp the complexities of this universal language of science. Mathematics, called by Carl Friedrich Gauss 'the queen of the sciences', knows no barriers of race, nationality, culture, or politics. Nor does it recognize frontiers between science and the arts, for it is both science and art. Paradoxically, therefore, it is at once democratic and exclusive, for only those may use this language who have brains, concentration^ and imagination enough to follow its cunning intricacies, unanticipated simplicities, its symmetries and sublime asymmetries. For Sir Michael, the beauty of mathematics is an elegance achieved by understanding the complexities of reality and expressing them in simpler, more orderly forms. Sir Michael's progress as a mathematician might be called a 'geometrical progression' of prizes and honours, the First Smith's Prize being awarded to hi m the year he became 25 and also research fellow at Trinity College' where he is now Master. In 1955 he was awarded a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship and became a member of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study for the first time, one of several occasions. Between 1958 and 1961 he was a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, then defected to that other university, Oxford, achieving the rank of reader and professorial fellow of St. Catherine's at the early age of 32. When just 33, he was made a fellow of that most prestigious of learned scientific bodies, the Royal Society. The Nobel Prize committee making no award for mathematics, the highest honour in the field is the Fields Medal. This Atiyah won in 1966, while in his late thirties. The Royal Medal followed in 1968 and i n 1988 the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, of which he became a research professor in the early 1970s and president from 1990 to 1995. A characteristic of mathematics is that Chinese University Bulletin Spring • Summer 1997 4