Home > Simon Donaldson

Donaldson gained a BA in mathematics from Pembroke College, Oxford in 1979, and in 1980 began postgraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford, first under Nigel Hitchen and later under Atiyah's supervision. In 1982, as a second-year graduate student, Donaldson proved a result that stunned the mathematical world. He published the result in a paper Self-dual connections and the topology of smooth 4-manifolds which appeared in 1983.

Donaldson's result, together with work of Michael Freedman implied that there are "exotic" 4-spaces, i.e. 4-dimensional differentiable manifolds which are topologically but not differentiably equivalent to the standard Euclidean 4-space R⁴. In other words, 4-space has more than one differential structure. The result is remarkable as it is only for n = 4 that such exotic n-spaces exist.

After gaining his doctorate from Oxford University in 1983, Donaldson was appointed a Junior Research Fellow at All Souls College, OxfordAll Souls College (in full: The College of All Souls of the Faithful Departed, of Oxford is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. All Souls is an oddity in that it has no students, consisting entirely of Fellow, he spent the academic year 1983-84 at the Institute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study is a private institution in Princeton Township, New Jersey, designed to foster pure cutting-edge research by scientists in a variety of fields without the complications of teaching or funding, or the agendas of sponsorship at Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 19851985 is a common year starting on Tuesday. Events January events January 1 Creation of the Internet's Domain Name System. January 17 British Telecom annouces they are going to abolish the famous red telephone boxes. January 23 A debate in the House of Lor. In 1999For the album by Prince, see 1999 (album 1999 is a common year starting on Friday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the UN. Events Kosovo War Former child star Gary Coleman files for bankruptcy Y2K prep he moved to Imperial College, London.

Donaldson received the Junior Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical SocietyThe London Mathematical Society ( LMS) is one of the leading mathematical societies in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1865 (the first president was Augustus de Morgan) and it was granted a royal charter a century later in 1965. The Society's pu in 1985 and in the following year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and, also in 1986, he received a Fields Medal. Ironically he was turned down for fellowship of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications on the grounds that it he applied too soon after his doctorate! He was awarded the 1994 Crafoord Prize.