Credits: Photo: John Nikolai Caption: Isadore Singer is seen here with his Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem, which, with Michael Atiyah, deeply and irrecoverably tied together the mathematical fields of analysis, geometry, and topology. Credits: Photo courtesy of the MIT Museum Caption: Isadore Singer as a young man
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Institute Professor Emeritus Isadore M. Singer, an enormously influential figure in 20th-century science whose work united mathematics and physics, died on Feb. 11. He was 96.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Singer not only profoundly affected the development of mathematics, but discovered connections between math and physics that led to the creation of a new field, index theory. Singer was the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his pioneering work, including the National Medal of Sc