Raoul Bott

Raoul Bott (September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005) was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. Bott was born in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Margit Kovács and Rudolph Bott. His father was of Austrian descent, and his mother was of Hungarian Jewish descent; Bott was raised a Catholic by his mother and stepfather. Bott grew up in Czechoslovakia and spent his working life in the United States. His family emigrated to Canada in 1938, and subsequently he served in the Canadian Army in Europe during World War II. Bott later went to college at McGill University in Montreal, where he studied electrical engineering. He then earned a PhD in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1949. His thesis, titled Electrical Network Theory, was written under the direction of Richard Duffin. Afterward, he began teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Bott continued his study at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1959 to 1999. In 2005 Bott died of cancer in San Diego. With Richard Duffin at Carnegie Mellon, Bott studied existence of electronic filters corresponding to given positive-real functions. In 1949 they proved a fundamental theorem of filter synthesis. Duffin and Bott extended earlier work by Otto Brune that requisite functions of complex frequency s could be realized by a passive network of inductors and capacitors. The proof, relying on induction on the sum of the degrees of the polynomials in the numerator and denominator of the rational function, was published in Journal of Applied Physics, volume 20, page 816. In his 2000 interview with Allyn Jackson of the American Mathematical Society, he explained that he sees "networks as discrete versions of harmonic theory", so his experience with network synthesis and electronic filter topology introduced him to algebraic topology.