Isadore Manuel Singer was born on May 3, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan. He entered the University of Michigan in 1941 and graduated with a B. S. in physics in 1944, followed by 3 years of service in the U. S. Army Signal Corps. During that period, he decided to prepare for post graduate studies in physics by building a strong mathematical background in differential geometry and group theory. In the process, he became “hooked” on mathematics and entered the University of Chicago in January 1947, emerging 3 years later with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His dissertation titled, Lie Algebras of Unbounded Operators, paved the way for further studies in uniformly continuous representations of Lie groups and eventually elliptic operators.
In the years that followed, Isadore climbed the tenure track ladder from instructor to professor at various universities including MIT, the University of California, Columbia University, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, attaining the status of full professor at MIT in 1959. In the early 1960’s he formed a collaboration with Sir Michael Atiyah that spanned 20 years and yielded a series of joint papers containing a wide range of results including the famous Atiyah-Singer index theorem which has important applications in physics. In 2004, Sir Michael Atiyah and Isadore Singer were jointly awarded the Abel Prize for their discovery of the index theorem.
When asked about his hobbies, Singer responded, I love to play tennis, and I try to do so two or three times a week. That refreshes me, and I think that it has helped me work hard in mathematics all these years. It certainly didn’t damage his health because he died in 2021 in his 97th year.
