Raoul Bott - Career

Career

Bott later went to college at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied electrical engineering. He then earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1949. His thesis, titled Electrical Network Theory, was written under the direction of Richard Duffin. Afterward, he began teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1959 to 1999. In 2005, Dr. Bott died in San Diego after a battle with cancer.

Initially he worked on the theory of electrical circuits (Bott-Duffin theorem from 1949), then switched to pure mathematics.

He studied the homotopy theory of Lie groups, using methods from Morse theory, leading to the Bott periodicity theorem (1956). In the course of this work, he introduced Morse–Bott functions, an important generalization of Morse functions.

This led to his role as collaborator over many years with Michael Atiyah, initially via the part played by periodicity in K-theory. Bott made important contributions towards the index theorem, especially in formulating related fixed-point theorems, in particular the so-called 'Woods Hole fixed-point theorem', a combination of the Riemann–Roch theorem and Lefschetz fixed-point theorem (it is named after Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the site of a conference at which collective discussion formulated it). The major Atiyah–Bott papers on what is now the Atiyah–Bott fixed-point theorem were written in the years up to 1968; they collaborated further in recovering in contemporary language Ivan Petrovsky on Petrovsky lacunas of hyperbolic partial differential equations, prompted by Lars Gårding. In the 1980s, Atiyah and Bott investigated gauge theory, using the Yang–Mills equations on a Riemann surface to obtain topological information about the moduli spaces of stable bundles on Riemann surfaces.

He is also well known in connection with the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem on representation theory of Lie groups via holomorphic sheaves and their cohomology groups; and for work on foliations.

He introduced Bott–Samelson varieties and the Bott residue formula for complex manifolds and the Bott cannibalistic class.