Nigel Hitchin | |
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Nigel Hitchin, 2004
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Born |
Holbrook, Derbyshire, England |
2 August 1946
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).