Nigel Hitchin

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Nigel Hitchin (b. August 2, 1946 in Holbrook, Derbyshire) is a British mathematician working in the field of differential geometry and algebraic geometry. He received his D.Phil; from Oxford University in 1972. In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University, and received the Sylvester Medal in 2000.

In his 2002 article Generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds he introduced 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.

[edit] External links

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