Biography:Graeme Segal

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Short description: Australian mathematician
Graeme Bryce Segal
Graeme Segal.jpeg
Graeme Segal in Berkeley, 1982
Born (1941-12-21) 21 December 1941 (age 82)
NationalityAustralia n
Alma materUniversity of Sydney
St Catherine's College, Oxford
Known forAtiyah–Segal completion theorem
Segal conjecture
Spouse(s)Marina Warner
AwardsPólya Prize (1990)
Sylvester Medal (2010)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsSt John's College, Cambridge[1]
All Souls College, Oxford
ThesisEquivariant K-theory (1967)
Doctoral advisorMichael Atiyah

Graeme Bryce Segal FRS[2] (born 21 December 1941) is an Australian mathematician, and professor at the University of Oxford.

Biography

Segal was educated at the University of Sydney, where he received his BSc degree in 1961. He went on to receive his D.Phil. in 1967 from St Catherine's College, Oxford; his thesis, written under the supervision of Michael Atiyah, was titled Equivariant K-theory.

His thesis was in the area of equivariant K-theory. The Atiyah–Segal completion theorem in that subject was a major motivation for the Segal conjecture, which he formulated. He has made many other contributions to homotopy theory in the past four decades, including an approach to infinite loop spaces. He was also a pioneer of elliptic cohomology, which is related to his interest in topological quantum field theory.

Segal was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1970 in Nice[3] and in 1990 in Kyoto.[4] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982 and an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.[5] He was awarded the Sylvester Medal by the Royal Society in 2010.[6]

He was Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry from 1990 to 1999.

Segal was elected the President of the London Mathematical Society in 2011.

He is married to writer, Marina Warner. They live in London.[7]

Books

  • Loop Groups (Oxford Mathematical Monographs). New ed. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2003, ISBN:0-19-853561-9 (with Andrew Pressley).
  • Lectures on Lie groups and Lie algebras (London Mathematical Society Student texts Vol. 32). 5th ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN:0-521-49579-2 (with Ian G. Macdonald and Roger Carter).

References

  1. Dr Graeme Segal – All Souls College Oxford
  2. "Fellows of the Royal Society". Royal Society. http://royalsociety.org/about-us/fellowship/fellows/. Retrieved 14 December 2011. "Dr Graeme Segal, elected fellow 1982" 
  3. Segal, G. "Equivariant stable homotopy theory." In Actes du Congrès International des Mathématiciens (Nice, 1970), vol. 2, pp. 59–63. 1970.
  4. Segal, Graeme. "Geometric aspects of quantum field theory." In Proc. Intern. Congress Kyoto 1990, Math. Soc, pp. 1387–1396. 1990.
  5. "Graeme Segal wins Sylvester Medal". All Souls College, Oxford. 2010-06-09. Archived from the original on 4 October 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20101004010153/http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk/news_detail.php?news_id=33. Retrieved 2010-10-12. 
  6. "The Sylvester Medal". The Royal Society. http://royalsociety.org/Sylvester-Medal/. Retrieved 2010-10-12. 
  7. Higgins, Charlotte (6 March 2021). "Interview – Marina Warner". The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/06/war-brides-spies-and-burning-bookshops-marina-warner-on-writing-her-memoir. Retrieved 7 March 2021. ,

External links