Nigel Hitchin (b. August 2, 1946 in Holbrook, Derbyshire) is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. is the 214th day of the year (215th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full 1946 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Leonhard Euler, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study and research is the field of mathematics. ... In mathematics, differential topology is the field dealing with differentiable functions on differentiable manifolds. ... Algebraic geometry is a branch of mathematics which, as the name suggests, combines techniques of abstract algebra, especially commutative algebra, with the language and the problematics of geometry. ... Mathematical physics is the scientific discipline concerned with the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the development of mathematical methods suitable for such applications and for the formulation of physical theories. ...

He earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford in 1968.^[1] After moving to Wolfson College, he received his D.Phil. in 1972. In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University, a position previously held by his doctoral supervisor (and later research collaborator) Sir Michael Atiyah. A B.A. issused as a certificate Bachelor of Arts (B.A., BA or A.B.), from the Latin Artium Baccalaureus is an undergraduate bachelors degree awarded for either a course or a program in the liberal arts or the sciences, or both. ... and of the Jesus College College name Jesus College in the University of Oxford of Queen Elizabeths Foundation Named after Jesus Christ Established 1571 Sister college Jesus College, Cambridge Principal The Lord Krebs JCR President Paolo Wyatt Undergraduates 340 MCR President Jahan Zahid Graduates 160 Location Turl Street, Oxford... College name Wolfson College Named after Sir Isaac Wolfson, Bt. ... Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated Ph. ... The Savilian Chair of Geometry is the position of professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford in England. ... Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, OM (born 22 April 1929) is a mathematician who was born in London. ...

Amongst his notable discoveries are the Hitchin integrable system, the Hitchin-Thorpe inequality, Hitchin's projectively flat connection over Teichmuller space, Hitchin's self-duality equations, the Atiyah-Hitchin monopole metric, the ADHM constuction of instantons (of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin), and the hyper-Kaehler quotient construction (of Hitchin, Karlhede, Lindstrom and Rocek).

In his article on generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds, he introduced the notion of generalized complex manifolds, providing a single structure that incorporates, as examples, Poisson manifolds, symplectic manifolds and complex manifolds. These have found wide applications as the geometries of flux compactifications in string theory and also in topological string theory. Calabi-Yau manifold (an artists impression) In mathematics, a Calabi-Yau manifold is a compact Kähler manifold with a vanishing first Chern class. ... In the field of mathematics known as differential geometry, a generalized complex structure is a property of a differential manifold that includes as special cases a complex structure and a symplectic structure. ... A Poisson manifold is a differential manifold M such that the algebra of smooth functions over it, is equipped with a bilinear map called the Poisson bracket turning it into a Poisson algebra. ... In mathematics, a symplectic manifold is a smooth manifold equipped with a closed, nondegenerate 2-form. ... In differential geometry, a complex manifold is a manifold such that every neighborhood looks like the complex n-space. ... In physics, compactification plays an important part in string theory. ... Interaction in the subatomic world: world lines of pointlike particles in the Standard Model or a world sheet swept up by closed strings in string theory String theory is a model of fundamental physics whose building blocks are one-dimensional extended objects called strings, rather than the zero-dimensional point... In theoretical physics, topological string theory is a simplified version of string theory. ...

Hitchin was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Oxford's Jesus College in 1998^[1], and both the Sylvester Medal (2000) and the Polya Prize (2002) have been awarded to him in honor of his far-reaching work. A conference was held in honor of his 60th birthday, in conjunction with the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Spain. The Sylvester Medal is a bronze medal awarded every three years by the Royal Society for the encouragement of mathematical research. ... Pólya Prize refers to two prizes in the field of mathematics named after Hungarian mathematician George Pólya. ... The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the biggest congress in mathematics. ...

In the span of his career, Hitchin has supervised nearly thirty research students, including Simon Donaldson (part-supervised with Atiyah). Simon Kirwan Donaldson, born in Cambridge in 1957, is an English mathematician famous for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds. ...

Reference

1. ^ ^{a b} Fellows' News, Jesus College Record (1998/9) (p.12)

• Hitchin, Nigel, Generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds, Quarterly Journal of Mathematics 54 (2003), no. 3, 281–308. ArXiv DOI:10.1093/qmath/hag025

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External links

• His home page at the University of Oxford
• Nigel Hitchin at the Mathematics Genealogy Project