Nigel Hitchin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 article on 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] Reference

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

[edit] External links

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