The London Mathematical Society (LMS) would like to congratulate Professor Sir Simon Donaldson (Imperial College London) who has been awarded the Wolf Prize for Mathematics, jointly with Professor Yakos Eliashberg (Stanford University). Sir Simon receives the award for his contributions to differential geometry and topology.
The Wolf Foundation inaugurated the Wolf Prize in 1978, awarding the Prize to academics who have made ‘significant breakthroughs and extraordinary achievements in agriculture, mathematics, medicine, physics, chemistry and the arts’.
Sir Simon has been a member of the LMS since 1983. He was awarded the LMS Whitehead Prize in 1984 and the Pólya Prize in 1999. Sir Simon was a member of LMS Council from 2010-2013 and he continues to contribute to the work of the LMS as an Editor of the LMS Journal of Topology.
Sir Simon is well known for his research on the topology of smooth four-dimensional manifolds and the Donaldson–Thomas theory. As a PhD student at Oxford Sir Simon produced research that gained worldwide recognition where he showed that there are phenomena in 4-dimensions that have no counterpart in any other dimension and established him as one of the UK's foremost mathematicians.
During his distinguished career Sir Simon has been awarded some of the highest honours in mathematics. He was a Fields medallist in 1986 and the same year he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society, and received the Society’s Royal Medal in 1992. In 2006 he was awarded the King Faisal Prize and in 2009 the Shaw Prize. His service to mathematics was rewarded in 2012 when he was knighted in the New Year Honours and in 2014 he was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics.
More information about the Wolf Prize is available here.