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Michael Atiyah - Road trip through America (26/93)

1,892 views · Published 21 June 2017 · 0:54 · Indexed 30 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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British mathematician Michael Atiyah (1929-2019) studied in Cambridge where he became a Fellow of Trinity College and later held professorships at Princeton and Oxford. He is best known for his work on the K-theory and the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem. [Listener: Nigel Hitchin; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: I had this Commonwealth fellowship which was… one of the conditions of which was you had to spend three months travelling. So in the summer, I mean we bought an old car and we drove right round the United States, spending three months going through Chicago and the mid-west and visiting all the national parks, and California, and then as a bonus we drove down to Mexico where Lefschetz was organising a conference. And he more or less invited me to come along. So we went down to Mexico for a month, came back, so we did a tremendous trip round the United States and got to see large parts of it that way and that was really very interesting and made me contacts in other places which I've followed since. So it was a… but I mean if you go as a young person, America's obviously… is a country for young people. It's not so good for old people, I think.

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