Who are you looking for?

Install Famoose

Keep Famoose on your home screen or desktop for easy access.

Open this site in Chrome or Edge and look for Install app in the browser menu or address bar. If no install option appears, you can bookmark Famoose instead.

Famoose.co
Appearance
Text size
Page width
Colour
Discover›Science
Contents
Simon Donaldson
Mathematician

Simon Donaldson

Famoose for

Transforming the study of smooth four-dimensional spaces.

Smooth four-manifolds · Donaldson invariants

Born
20 August 1957
Birthplace
Cambridge

More people

Marie CurieDiscovering polonium and radium.Albert EinsteinDeveloping the theory of relativity.Charles DarwinExplaining evolution through natural selection.

Simon Donaldson

English mathematician whose use of gauge theory revealed unexpected features of four-dimensional geometry. His work also extends to complex geometry.

Early life

Cambridge and Oxford

Studied mathematics at Cambridge before postgraduate work at Oxford with Nigel Hitchin and Michael Atiyah.

Career

  1. 1982

    Doctoral breakthrough

    Proved the result that became Donaldson’s theorem.

  2. 1985

    Oxford chair

    Became Wallis Professor of Mathematics.

  3. 1998

    Imperial College

    Moved to a pure mathematics professorship.

Contributions

Smooth four-manifolds

Published the paper establishing his major early theorem.

Donaldson invariants

Developed tools sensitive to a space’s smooth structure.

Beyond work

Family

Met his wife Nora, a mathematical statistician, during a visit to the University of Maryland in the 1983–84 academic year. They have three children together, and he also has a stepdaughter.

Sources & photo creditBiography and career ↗Biographical references ↗Family — biographical source ↗

Original photograph. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.

Photo: Greuel, Gert-Martin. CC BY-SA 2.0 de · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.