Sir Michael Francis Atiyah was born in the United Kingdom in 1929 where he is now Honorary Professor of the University of Edinburgh School of Mathematics, in Scotland.

He won the Fields Medal in 1966, and the Abel Prize in 2004 (the two most important prizes in the field of Mathematics, a discipline which does not have its own Nobel Prize).

He proved the so-called Atiyah-Singer Theorem in the 60s, a result that allowed the development of many branches Mathematics. He is also the founder of one of the main tools in algebraic topology known as Topological K Theory.