Raoul Bott
Raoul Bott (* September 24, 1923 in Budapest, † December 20, 2005 in Carlsbad, California ) was an American mathematician, known for his many contributions to topology and geometry.
Life
Bott lived much of his life in the United States. His mother and his aunt spoke Hungarian. Since his Czech stepfather was German, he grew up with the German language. He learned from an early English and spoke it perfectly except for a small accent. He went to school in Slovakia and thus also learned Slovak. Despite these circumstances, Bott always claimed that he had an aversion to learning languages .
In 1938, he fled with his stepparents via England to Canada, where he joined the McGill University in Montreal and studied electrical engineering. Bott began his work in the theory of electric lines ( Bott - Duffin theorem from 1949 ), but then went on to pure mathematics. In 1949 he received his doctorate at the Carnegie Institute of Technology Richard Duffin (Electrical Network Theory ). He then worked at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Michigan.
From 1959 to 1999 Bott was a professor at Harvard University as a professor of the prestigious " William Caspar- gray stone - Chair of Mathematics ". In 2000 he was awarded the Wolf Prize. In 1980 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina, in 2005, he became a foreign member of the Royal Society of London.
He studied the homotopy theory of Lie groups by using the methods of Morse theory. This led to Bottschen periodicity theorem in 1959. In this work he introduced the Morse - Bott functions, which are an important generalization of Morse functions. This led to his long-time collaboration with Michael Atiyah, originally caused by the share which he delivered in the periodicity of K- theory. He provided significant proportions for index theorem, especially in the formulation of related Fixpunkttheorems, the so-called Woods Hole fixed-point theorem ( Atiyah - Bott fixed point theorem ), a combination of the Riemann -Roch theorem and the Lefschetz Fixpunkttheorems, the Hole to Woods, Massachusetts was named ( the seat of a molecular biology research institution and known conference ).
Bott was also known by the connection of the Borel - Bott -Weil theorem for the representation theory of Lie groups by means of holomorphic sheaves and their cohomology groups, as well as for his work on foliations.
Bott died of cancer.
His doctoral include the Fields medalist Stephen Smale and Daniel Quillen and Peter Landweber, Robert MacPherson.