{"id":9397,"date":"2005-12-22T11:54:27","date_gmt":"2005-12-22T16:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/12\/22\/raoul-bott-1923-2005\/"},"modified":"2005-12-22T11:54:27","modified_gmt":"2005-12-22T16:54:27","slug":"raoul-bott-1923-2005","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/22\/raoul-bott-1923-2005\/","title":{"rendered":"Raoul Bott, 1923-2005"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sad to hear that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.harvard.edu\/history\/bott\/index.html\">Raoul Bott passed away this week<\/a> (via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=314\">Peter Woit<\/a>; see also <a href=\"http:\/\/golem.ph.utexas.edu\/~distler\/blog\/archives\/000709.html\">Jaques<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/motls.blogspot.com\/2005\/12\/father-of-bott-periodicity-died.html\">Lubo\u00c5\u00a1<\/a>).  Bott was one of the leading mathematicians of his time, but he was also an inspirational teacher and a warm human being.  When we were grad students at Harvard, Ted Pyne and I would try to attend whatever class he was giving, even though they were invariably at 8:30 in the morning, a time that was probably chosen intentionally since they were always so popular.  He had a joyful sense of humor, and was kind enough to help me out with some geometry questions relevant to a <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/ps\/gr-qc\/9404065\">paper<\/a> I was writing.  A truly great man.<\/p>\n<p><em>Update:<\/em>  Perhaps one story will give a flavor for Bott&#8217;s personality.  In class one morning he was in the midst of explaining the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Atiyah-Singer_index_theorem\">Atiyah-Singer index theorem<\/a> (one of the most important results in modern topology), when he paused and looked reflective.  Then he said something like, &#8220;The first I heard of this kind of thing was at a party at Princeton.  Just talking with one of those physicists, it may have been Wigner.  He was explaining this idea, saying that something like this <em>ought<\/em> to be true.  Unfortunately, I had had a few drinks, and I didn&#8217;t follow him so well.  But Atiyah was standing next to me, and he was perfectly sober!&#8221;  And he laughed at his own story with a  sense of open delight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sad to hear that Raoul Bott passed away this week (via Peter Woit; see also Jaques and Lubo\u00c5\u00a1). Bott was one of the leading mathematicians of his time, but he was also an inspirational teacher and a warm human being. When we were grad students at Harvard, Ted Pyne and I would try to attend [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}