{"id":157,"date":"2005-02-25T16:41:23","date_gmt":"2005-02-25T20:41:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=157"},"modified":"2005-02-25T16:41:23","modified_gmt":"2005-02-25T20:41:23","slug":"atiyahs-collected-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=157","title":{"rendered":"Atiyah’s Collected Works"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently acquired a copy of the new volume 6 of Atiyah’s collected works<\/A>, which contains things he wrote from the late eighties until very recently (the latest article is his joint paper with Graeme Segal on twisted K-theory<\/A>). Unfortunately the price of this book is very high (about $200). I’ve bought cars for less than what I paid for the book.<\/p>\n

Even more expensive is the full six-volume set<\/A>, which Oxford intends to sell for $1000. Luckily I bought the previous 5 volumes quite a few years ago at a somewhat more modest price. Atiyah is one of my great heroes among mathematicians. He’s up there among the top very few in any reasonable list of the greatest mathematicians of the second half of the twentieth century, and the extent of his influence in bringing together mathematics and physics is hard to overestimate. Witten’s great work on topological quantum field theory was done very much because of impetus from Atiyah. One of the articles in the new volume is the write-up of Atiyah’s amazing talk at the Weyl Symposium in 1987, where he first suggested that there should be a four-dimensional QFT whose observables were Donaldson invariants and whose Hilbert space was Floer homology. <\/p>\n

Atiyah is also known as Sir Michael. Before I heard about this I had always thought that the British system of honorary knighthoods was pretty silly, but the fact that they chose him gave me some respect for the whole system.<\/p>\n

It’s a shame the books are so expensive, since they are wonderful documents that deserve wide distribution. Atiyah has not only discovered wonderful new mathematics, but he writes about it in an elegant, inspiring and lucid way. The books contain many expository pieces he has written over the course of his career, and these are pretty much all well worth reading. I regard a large part of my mathematical education as having come from spending a lot of time with these volumes over the years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently acquired a copy of the new volume 6 of Atiyah’s collected works, which contains things he wrote from the late eighties until very recently (the latest article is his joint paper with Graeme Segal on twisted K-theory). Unfortunately … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}