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Nigel James Hitchin

Nigel Hitchin
Nigel Hitchin 2004.jpg
Nigel Hitchin, 2004
Born (1946-08-02) 2 August 1946 (age 71)
Holbrook, Derbyshire, England
Nationality United Kingdom
Alma mater Jesus College and Wolfson College, Oxford
Known for Higgs bundle
Hitchin functional
Hitchin–Thorpe inequality
Nahm–Hitchin description of monopoles
Generalized complex structure
Awards Whitehead Prize (1981)
Senior Berwick Prize (1990)
Sylvester Medal (2000)
Pólya Prize (2002)
Shaw Prize (2016)
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions University of Oxford
University of Warwick
Doctoral advisor Brian Steer
Michael Atiyah
Doctoral students Simon Donaldson
Tamás Hausel
Jacques Hurtubise

Nigel James Hitchin FRS (born 2 August 1946) is the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford University and a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics.

Hitchin attended Ecclesbourne School, Duffield, and earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1968. After moving to Wolfson College, he received his D.Phil. in 1972. In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University, a position previously held by his doctoral supervisor (and later research collaborator) Sir Michael Atiyah.

Amongst his notable discoveries are the Hitchin integrable system, the Hitchin–Thorpe inequality, Hitchin's projectively flat connection over Teichmüller space, Hitchin's self-duality equations, the Atiyah–Hitchin monopole metric, the Atiyah–Hitchin–Singer theorem, the ADHM construction of instantons (of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin), and the Hyperkähler quotient (of Hitchin, Karlhede, Lindström and Rocek).


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