Simon Donaldson

Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson, born on 20 August 1957, is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson-Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London and holds emeritus status at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics and Stony Brook University in New York. He gained a BA in mathematics from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1979 and began postgraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1980, first under Nigel Hitchin and later under Michael Atiyah. Still a postgraduate student, he proved in 1982 the result that became known as Donaldson's theorem.