Atiyah, who was retired, had been an honorary professor in the School of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. Atiyah received the two highest honours in mathematics: the Fields Medal, in 1966, and the Abel Prize, in 2004. This became their famous Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem, which they developed into an entire field, called index theory. In the mid-1970s, in the middle of this work, Atiyah learned something surprising: Physicists had been creating their own, less formal version of index theory in parallel with the mathematicians. Atiyah and Singer teamed up with the mathematician Raoul Bott and Witten, who was then barely out of graduate school.

Source: bd News24 January 12, 2019 07:18 UTC