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Raoul Bott, FRS (born September 24 1923 , died December 20 2005 ) was a Mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to Geometry in its broad sense. He was born in Budapest , but spent his working life in the USA. His family emigrated to Canada in 1938; there he studied at McGill University . He was a professor at Harvard University from 1959 to 1999, and received the Wolf Prize in 2000. In 2005 , he was elected an Overseas Fellow of the Royal Society Of London . He died in San Diego after a battle with cancer. Initially he worked on the theory of Electrical Circuit s ( Bott-Duffin Theorem from 1949 ), then switched to pure mathematics. He studied the Homotopy Theory of Lie Group s, using methods from Morse Theory , leading to the Bott Periodicity Theorem (1956). In the course of this work, he introduced Morse-Bott functions, an important generalization of Morse functions. This led to his role as collaborator over many years with were written in the years up to 1968; they collaborated further in recovering in contemporary language results of Ivan Petrovsky on Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equation s, prompted by Lars Gårding . He is also known in connection with the Borel-Bott-Weil Theorem on representation theory of Lie groups via holomorphic Sheaves and their cohomology groups; and for work on Foliation s. His students included Robert MacPherson , Peter Landweber , Daniel Quillen and Stephen Smale . His mother and aunts spoke Hungarian . His Czech stepfather did not, so the principal language at home was German . He had an English governesses from a young age, so he also spoke perfect English (and retained a very faint English accent throughout his life). The language of his high school was Slovak . Despite all this Bott claimed a distaste for learning languages. EXTERNAL LINKS
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