Singer, left, and Michael Atiyah, center, receive the Abel Award from King Harald of Norway, Oslo, 2004. The first official Abel Prize came a year later.Īs described in their Abel citation, Singer and Atiyah were honored “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.” Drs. The Abel Prize, conferred by the government of Norway, was first awarded, in honorary fashion, in 2002, coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Norwegian mathematician Niels Abel’s birth. Fields Medals are another, specifically awarded to those mathematicians under age 40. Their work eventually earned them the 2004 Abel Prize, one of mathematics’ equivalents of the Nobel Prize. In the early 1960s, Singer and Atiyah began applying topological tools to differential equations. Atiyah, meanwhile, specialized in topology,” Rehmeyer continues, “which … considers shapes to be elastic, so that objects can be pulled or squished without changing their fundamental nature.” The iconic cup-to-donut: a continuous transformation made possible because each is a single-holed object in three-dimensional space. Singer was the expert in analysis, which is the study of differential equations, used to describe physical phenomena in the language of calculus. Together with Atiyah, he created an unimagined link between the mathematical subfields of analysis and topology-and then united those fields with theoretical physics.” “But,” Rehmeyer notes, “all those were dwarfed by his singular contribution, the Atiyah-Singer Index theorem. Singer’s mathematical “discoveries” (as mathematicians like to call them) include the Kadison-Singer conjecture (formulated in 1959 and proved only in 2013), the Ambrose-Singer theorem, the McKean-Singer formula, and the concept of Ray-Singer torsion. Image by Ivan Massar/MIT Museum from The New York Times, February 12, 2021. Isadore Manuel Singer, 1924–2021, American mathematician, Emeritus Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. The article caught my eye when she wrote that Singer “bridged a gulf from math to physics.” Dr. IN THE NEW York Times, February 14, 2021, Julie Rehmeyer observed the passing, at age 96, of mathematician Isadore Singer.
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