Simon Donaldson

Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson (born 20 August 1957) is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.

Biography

Donaldson's father was an electrical engineer in the physiology department at the University of Cambridge, and his mother earned a science degree there. Donaldson gained a BA degree in mathematics from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1979, and in 1980 began postgraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford, at first under Nigel Hitchin and later under Michael Atiyah's supervision. Still a postgraduate student, Donaldson proved in 1982 a result that would establish his fame. He published the result in a paper "Self-dual connections and the topology of smooth 4-manifolds" which appeared in 1983. In the words of Atiyah, the paper "stunned the mathematical world."

Whereas Michael Freedman classified topological four-manifolds, Donaldson's work focused on four-manifolds admitting a differentiable structure, using instantons, a particular solution to the equations of Yang–Mills gauge theory which has its origin in quantum field theory. One of Donaldson's first results gave severe restrictions on the intersection form of a smooth four-manifold. As a consequence, a large class of the topological four-manifolds do not admit any smooth structure at all. Donaldson also derived polynomial invariants from gauge theory. These were new topological invariants sensitive to the underlying smooth structure of the four-manifold. They made it possible to deduce the existence of "exotic" smooth structures—certain topological four-manifolds could carry an infinite family of different smooth structures.

After gaining his DPhil degree from Oxford University in 1983, Donaldson was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He spent the academic year 1983–84 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 1985. After spending one year visiting Stanford University, he moved to Imperial College London in 1998 as Professor of Pure Mathematics.

In 2014, he joined the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, United States.

Awards

Donaldson was an invited speaker of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1983, and a plenary speaker at the ICM in 1986, 1998, and 2018.

In 1985, Donaldson received the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society. In 1994, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize in Mathematics. In February 2006, Donaldson was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for science for his work in pure mathematical theories linked to physics, which have helped in forming an understanding of the laws of matter at a subnuclear level. In April 2008, he was awarded the Nemmers Prize in Mathematics, a mathematics prize awarded by Northwestern University. In 2009 he was awarded the Shaw Prize in Mathematics (jointly with Clifford Taubes) for their contributions to geometry in 3 and 4 dimensions. In 2014, he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics "for the new revolutionary invariants of 4-dimensional manifolds and for the study of the relation between stability in algebraic geometry and in global differential geometry, both for bundles and for Fano varieties." In January 2019, he was awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (jointly with Xiuxiong Chen and Song Sun). In 2020 he received the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (jointly with Yakov Eliashberg).

In 1986, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society