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Dear all,

We are pleased to let you know that  the first of the Maxwell Institute's Atiyah Lectures will be given by Professor Jean-Pierre Bourguignon on 11 January 2021 at  15.00-16.00.

The Atiyah Lecture is an annual lecture to commemorate Sir Michael Atiyah (1929-2019), delivered by a distinguished mathematician who has provided a service to the international mathematical community.

We are privileged to have Professor Bourguignon as our inaugural Atiyah lecturer. Professor Bourguignon is a distinguished differential geometer who served as director of the IHES and as  president of the French Mathematical Society, of the European Mathematical Society and most recently of the  European Research Council (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Bourguignon).

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83408359124
Meeting ID: 834 0835 9124
Passcode: IAL

The web pages for the lecture are http://www.maxwell.ac.uk/events/distinguished_lectures/ and https://www.icms.org.uk/events/event/?id=1128

Title and abstract are given below.

Best wishes,
Ivan Cheltsov

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What  is a Spinor?

This was the title of the lecture Sir Michael gave in September 2013  at IHES on the occasion of the farewell conference for my retirement as Director.

This was most appropriate as I learned a lot from him about this subject. It is true that mathematicians struggled for a long  time to get acquainted with spinors. It is in sharp contrast with  the fact that physicists adopted them without hesitation as soon as Paul-Adrien Maurice Dirac showed they were essential to formulate a quantum equation invariant under the Poincaré group.

Indeed spinors have a number of features that make them both subtle and powerful to deal with mathematical problems. Of great importance are of course the natural differential operators universally  defined on spinor fields, namely the Dirac and the Penrose operators.

The purpose of the lecture is to revisit historical steps taken to master these objects, explore their remarkable geometric content and present some mathematical problems on which they shed light.
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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