Nigel Hitchin | |
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Nigel Hitchin, 2004
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Born | 2 August 1946 Holbrook, Derbyshire, England |
Nationality | United Kingdom |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | University of Oxford |
Alma mater | University of Oxford |
Doctoral advisor | Brian Steer Michael Atiyah |
Doctoral students | Jørgen Ellegaard Andersen Yuri Bozhkov Simon Donaldson Oscar Garcia-Prada Tamás Hausel [1] Jacques Hurtubise Simon Salamon |
Known for | Hitchin functional Hitchin–Thorpe inequality Nahm–Hitchin description of monopoles |
Nigel Hitchin (b. 2 August 1946 in Holbrook, Derbyshire) is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics.
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Hitchin attended Ecclesbourne School, Duffield, and earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford in 1968.[2] 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.
Amongst his notable discoveries are the Hitchin integrable system, the Hitchin–Thorpe inequality, Hitchin's projectively flat connection over Teichmüller space, Hitchin's self-duality equations, the Atiyah-Hitchin monopole metric, the ADHM construction of instantons (of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin), and the hyperkähler quotient construction (of Hitchin, Karlhede, Lindström 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.
In 1991 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.[3]
In 2003 he was awarded an Honorary Degree (Doctor of Science) from the University of Bath.
Hitchin was elected as an Honorary Fellow of Oxford's Jesus College in 1998,[2] and the Senior Berwick Prize (1990), the Sylvester Medal (2000) and the Pólya Prize (2002) have been awarded to him in honour of his far-reaching work. A conference was held in honour of his 60th birthday, in conjunction with the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians in Spain.
In the span of his career, Hitchin has supervised nearly thirty research students, including Simon Donaldson (part-supervised with Atiyah).
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