I noticed today that the final volume of Raoul Bott’s collected papers, which Loring Tu has been working on editing for quite a while, has finally appeared. The Springer webpage for the book is here, and its content is available at institutions with a Springer subscription here here. Many of the articles within can be accessed by other means, for example Tu’s article about Bott’s life and work is available here (updated version here) and the collection of articles by others about him is here.
After Bott’s death in 2005 I wrote a blog post here, and won’t repeat what’s there. Much of the material in this last volume is related to mathematics that grew out of Witten’s work on Chern-Simons theory. Unlike earlier volumes, which are devoted mostly to Bott’s important research papers (almost all of which are well-worth reading!), here many of the articles are of an expository nature, written for various lectures that Bott gave. The volume also includes various incidental material, such as speeches written for various events. Reading these gives a good idea of the wonderful human being that he was, it’s great to have them finally collected and available.
Thanks for this Peter.
Any idea if there might be a curated collection of links to lectures given by Raoul which are available on line? I went looking a while back and was disappointed at how little I could find.
Eric,
Would be great if someone could do that. I haven’t looked much, but unfortunately I think Bott’s lecturing years were coming to an end about the time everyone started recording lectures to put on Youtube. Quite a shame, since his lectures were always a wonderful experience.