Born May 3, 1924, to Polish immigrants, Singer grew up in Detroit during the Great Depression in a household where money was tight.
His success was all the more remarkable because of his humble beginnings. For years, his well-known weekly physics-mathematics seminar served as a hotbed for new ideas, inspiring new collaborations between mathematicians and physicists. Since first arriving at MIT in 1950, Singer always credited the Institute for giving him the freedom to pursue that interdisciplinary research. In 1963, Singer and Michael Atiyah hit upon an even more profound connection with the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem. This theorem deeply and irrecoverably tied together the mathematical fields of analysis, geometry, topology. A key part of their work was Singer’s rediscovery and generalization of the Dirac operator, fundamental to the understanding of the quantum theory of the electron. The newly generalized Dirac operator unlocked deep mysteries in mathematics, setting mathematics and physics on a collision course that continues to play out to this day. It was later found to be equivalent to key problems in applied mathematics, engineering, and theoretical computer science and was proved only in 2013, more than half a century years after it was initially posed. Singer was the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his pioneering work, including the National Medal of Science and the Abel Prize, often considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics.Īmong his greatest achievements, Singer and Richard Kadison formulated the Kadison-Singer Conjecture in 1959 as part of their work on formalizing the foundations of English physicist Paul Dirac’s quantum mechanics. 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, an enormously influential figure in 20th-century science whose work united mathematics and physics, died on Feb.