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One of the world’s greatest men has died. Most of you will have no idea who this is. I just don’t 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.
I was very close with his top collaborator. They were the Watson and Crick of mathematics to me. They rewrote my whole life.
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. Atiyah‘s spray-paint is everywhere here. 
Imagine watery planets with holes and twists. Knotted donut planets called base spaces. Crazy oceans called “Vector bundles” and “Principal bundles”.
He told us about how the twists and holes determine what waves must live on them and which cannot.
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.
