Michael Atiyah
On XEdit
2019Edit
One of the worldâs greatest men has died. Most of you will have no idea who this is. I just donât know how to bridge that gap yet to tell you what he did.
I was very close with his top collaborator. They were the Watson and Crick of mathematics to me. They rewrote my whole life.
Michael Atiyah OM FRS, President of the Royal Society 1990 -1995, died today. He was "a wonderful person who was a true internationalist and a fervent supporter for investing in talent â themes which resonate very clearly today." Read the full tribute https://royalsociety.org/news/2019/01/tribute-to-former-president-of-the-royal-society-sir-michael-atiyah/
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There is a little known stone wall on Long Island. While flawed, it is a gift to all mankind that should be a pilgrimage site, as an understanding of the contents is nesessary to understand our world. Think of it as transcendent graffiti. Atiyahâs spray-paint is everywhere here.
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Imagine watery planets with holes and twists. Knotted donut planets called base spaces. Crazy oceans called âVector bundlesâ and âPrincipal bundlesâ.
He told us about how the twists and holes determine what waves must live on them and which cannot.
He helped direct Ed Witten and Graeme Segal to truly tell us what Quantum Field Theory really was beyond being a physical theory. These men took a grab bag of techniques developed for calculation and showed us that they were a mellifluous whole of geometry, topology and physics.
If you want to know why I am so passionate about resisting the reign of terror against true scholarship it is this. Universities housed REAL scholarship beyond your wildest dreams. This kind of scholarship is not socially constructed. Almost no one can even do this level of work.
I completely agree with your assessment of the magnitude of the world's loss here. But who, in your view, was Atiyah's "top collaborator"? Bott, perhaps? Singer? Someone else? He shared credit with a large number of co-workers in his published work. (I'd vote for Bott, myself.)
I knew Bott and Singer pretty well myself, and I agree that it's not even close.
What a lunch we could have. Would love to hear your perspective.
They were such extraordinary persons, and their influence on me was exceeded only by that of Chern. I miss them all more than I can say. And perhaps we should indeed have lunch. Pretty sure we'd both enjoy it.
Are you anywhere near SF? I gotta hear your argument for Atiyah Bott. The main flaw on that wall IMO is the absence of Bott Periodicity. Other issues: Tits Freudenthal, the main Elliptic Deformation Complexes, Hopf Fibration, etc..
But Bott Periodicity is beyond mind blowing.
Yes, I reside in Mountain View, and get up to SF with some frequency. And I don't mean to make an argument for Atiyah-Bott, exactly; it's more of a feeling, born mostly of personal observation, that Atiyah-Bott had a much deeper aesthetic affinity than did Atiyah-Singer (say.)
@BraneRunner @MathPrinceps Some would put it higher.
He helped direct Ed Witten and Graeme Segal to truly tell us what Quantum Field Theory really was beyond being a physical theory. These men took a grab bag of techniques developed for calculation and showed us that they were a mellifluous whole of geometry, topology and physics.
If you want to know why I am so passionate about resisting the reign of terror against true scholarship it is this. Universities housed REAL scholarship beyond your wildest dreams. This kind of scholarship is not socially constructed. Almost no one can even do this level of work.
@vanest SUNY Stony Brook, Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. Itâs blocked partially by a staircase now.
Very sad news indeed - I knew Michael from when I was at @TrinCollCam he was brilliant, warm & amazing. Was at a conference where he was supposed to speak on thursday #higgscentre - he cancelled at the last minute....
More recently we talked about dark matter and black holes (2 yrs ago now) he was very excited about astro... b4 when i was a student he was just very encouraging and warm
One of the greatest minds of our time, Michael Atiyah, eulogized by his true still-active peers including Witten & Donaldson. With all the confusion/hype of this moment in time, it's worth reminding ourselves of what achievement sounds like w/o inflation:
2021Edit
Things got hard. They didnât get hopeless.
Yes we spent almost 40 years lying about string theory. But we could stop today. We could have the leaders in the field admit they made a *colossal* bad bet & ask âWhat did we dispose of while we were wildly over-hyping string theory?â
Its increasingly apparent to me that the next physics breakthrough is gonna be from #ai . Its humanly not possible anymore for theoretical physicists ..i was feeling it even around 2010
They can't stop, Eric. They're making a living from writing papers about things no one will ever see. It's a systemic problem that requires a systemic response. And the first step would be to admit they have a problem (which they don't).
Seems likely a lot of the math they developed will wind up handy, but it's a long time to wait for dessert.
Most of what physicists call math is totally uninteresting even for mathematicians. It's just advanced calculus. Look here is my qft and when I crunch it cross-sections fall out.
We may disagree intellectually more than I thought. This is Jackiwâs point: the era of physics thinking of mathematics as advanced calculus (analysis) wasnât fruitful.
That changed around 1975 when the quantum began to discover geometry.
Iâm honestly confused. What do you mean?
We are talking past each other. I am referring to particle physicists/astrophysicists/cosmologists who crunch out shallow and useless papers in the thousands. There's no interesting math in those. You're talking about something else entirely.
There are a lot of string theorists who have done things that really matter to geometry, topology, analysis on manifolds, representation theory. And I donât want to misunderstand your point.
Said differently Iâve been bullish on positive externalities of mathematical physics. But a lot of great math that got done isnât string theory. Itâs claimed to be stringy but it is really mostly mathematical physics or geometric field theory that is claimed by string theorists.