Education
Hitchin attended Ecclesbourne School, Duffield, and earned his Bachelor in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1968.
mathematician university professor
Hitchin attended Ecclesbourne School, Duffield, and earned his Bachelor in mathematics from Jesus College, Oxford, in 1968.
After moving to Wolfson College, he received his Doctorate.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 Teichmüller space, Hitchin"s self-duality equations, the Atiyah–Hitchin monopole metric, the Atiyah–Hitchin–Singer theorem, the ADHM construction of instantons (of Atiyah, Drinfeld, Hitchin, and Manin), and the Hyperkähler quotient (of Hitchin, Karlhede, Lindström and Rocek).
In his article on generalized Calabi–Yau manifolds, he introduced the notion of generalized complex manifolds, providing a single structure that incorporates, as examples, Poisson manifolds, symplectic manifolds and complex manifolds.
These have found wide applications as the geometries of flux compactifications in string theory and also in topological string theory. He conjectured the Kobayashi–Hitchin correspondence.
In the span of his career, Hitchin has supervised nearly thirty research students, including Simon Donaldson (part-supervised with Atiyah). NIgel Hitchin is managing editor of the journal Mathematische Annalen.
Royal Society; American Mathematical Society.