Nigel Hitchin

Nigel Hitchin (b. 2 August 1946 in Holbrook, Derbyshire) is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford in 1968. After moving to Wolfson College, he received his D.Phil. in 1972. In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University, a position previously held by his doctoral supervisor (an... more

Nigel Hitchin (b. 2 August 1946 in Holbrook, Derbyshire) is a British mathematician working in the fields of differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and mathematical physics. He earned his BA in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford in 1968. After moving to Wolfson College, he received his D.Phil. in 1972. In 1997 he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of Geometry at Oxford University, a position previously held by his doctoral supervisor (and later research collaborator) Sir Michael Atiyah. Amongst his notable discoveries are the Hitchin integrable system, the Hitchin–Thorpe inequality, Hitchin's projectively flat connection over Teichmuller space, Hitchin's self-duality equations, the Atiyah-Hitchin monopole metric, the ADHM construction of instantons (of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin), and the hyper-Kaehler quotient construction (of Hitchin, Karlhede, Lindstrom and Rocek). In his article on generalized Calabi-Yau manifolds, he introduced the notion of generalized complex... less