Isadore Singer


Isadore Manuel Singer is an American mathematician. He is an Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
Singer is noted for his work with Michael Atiyah proving the Atiyah–Singer index theorem in 1962, which paved the way for new interactions between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. In early 1980s, while a professor at Berkeley, Singer co-founded the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute with Shiing-Shen Chern and Calvin Moore.

Biography

Singer was born in Detroit, Michigan, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1944. After obtaining his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 and 1950 respectively, Singer taught at UCLA, UC Berkeley and MIT, where he has spent the majority of his career.
The development of Atiyah-Singer index theorem relied upon the Dirac operator, where Singer rediscovered its importance to mathematics before the formulation of his famous contribution. He founded the subject of triangulated operator algebras with Richard V. Kadison, developed analytic torsion with D.B. Ray and with Henry McKean introduced heat equation formulas to the index theorem.
He was chair of the Committee of Science & Public Policy of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a member of the White House Science Council, and on the Governing Board of the United States National Research Council.

Awards and honors

Singer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Among the awards he has received are the Bôcher Memorial Prize and the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, both from the American Mathematical Society, the Eugene Wigner Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Abel Prize, the 2004 Gauss Lecture and the James Rhyne Killian Faculty Achievement Award from MIT.

Works

Some remarks on representations of connected groups ; Uniformly continuous representations of Lie groups ; A theorem on holonomy ; Function values as boundary integrals.