The award of medals by the President, Sir George Porter, at the Anniversary Meeting, 30 November 1988

Abstract

The Copley Medal is awarded to Sir Michael Atiyah, F. R. S., in recognition of his fundamental contributions to a wide range of topics in geometry, topology, analysis and theoretical physics. For a quarter of a century, Sir Michael Atiyah has been the unrivalled leader of mathematical research in Britain. His work spans a range unequalled among his contemporaries, including algebraic topology, algebraic and differential geometry, analysis and theoretical physics. Many of his pioneering contributions have been the seeds for extensive later developments. His most celebrated work centres around the Atiyah–Singer Index Theorem, which shows how the topological behaviour of a manifold influences the behaviour of elliptic partial differential equations over it. This is one of the great insights of twentieth-century mathematics. In a series of papers, he and his collaborators have explored its many variants and ramifications, and have opened up new directions in many areas of mathematics, breaking through the old divisions between topology, differential equations and functional analysis. In recent years he has been a leader in developing links between geometry and particle physics, and many of the topics he has helped develop are in the forefront of research by mathematicians and physicists in this new and active area.