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The new president of the Royal society says he isn’t necessarily the
right person for the job, ‘but there you are ..’ However, most people are
quite certain that he is just right for the job, with the eye and brain
to see into the heart of matters, cutting through irrelevancies. What the
new presedent, Sir Michael Atiyah, is really saying in all modesty is that
his predecessor, Lord Porter, is a hard act to follow.

In fact, to ensure Atiyah’s accession the Royal Society even bent one
of its traditions, so certain were the council and fellows that he was the
best person for the job. By custom of the past 100 years the presidency
goes alternately to someone from the physical sciences (which include mathematics
and chemistry) or the life sciences. Porter is a chemist, so the presidency
should have gove to a life scientist. There were eligible candidates too,
but instead the Royal Society chose Atiyah, a 61-year-old mathematician,
to be its president for the next five years.

‘It will be very difficult to follow George Porter,’ said Atiyah. ‘He’s
been very visible, very active in public affairs and he speaks forcibly
at the national level. The Royal Society has got gradually more and more
involved in national scientific policy. You need to have been there for
awhile before you say anything – luckily I don’t have to make my presidential
address until the end of the first year.’ I talked to him in his rooms at
Trinity College Cambridge, for as well as picking up the presidency, Atiyah
had only four weeks before taking over the mastership of this pre-eminent
matheticians’ college. To step into one great office is usually the fulfilment
of a life’s ambition: but two, and in one month?

Comparing his two new offices Atiyah commented: ‘As Master of Trinity
you can only innovate within narrow limits. The Master comes in late in
life, he is there for a few years and then he goes. He’s not expected or
intended to innovate. He’s supposed to help steer the thing a little bit
and give leadership. There are 138 fellows and 1000 students – and Trinity
has been here for 400 hundred years. So you are not expected to come in
with some 500-day programme.

‘The Royal Society is also a large organisation with a big staff, but
more depends on the president’s role or position. The president is the face
and voice of the society. He has to appear in public and speak for it. I
know little about COPUS (the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science)
but I know Sir Walter Bodmer (its chairman) very well and I will certainly
be taking an active interest in it. Presidents have been involved in policy
in varying degrees. The society itself has become more and more involved
in scientific policy at national level and one has to be active in public
affairs, scientific issues and the public interest.

‘There has been talk in the past about whether the Royal Society should
have a full-time president, like the American National Academy. Others say
the presidency is only a part time job but the pressures are building up.
Initially, at any rate, I expect to spend about two days a week in London
and I shall be using the flat in the Royal Society. But I repeat – you need
to have been there a while before you start making policy statements.’

Atiyah is not complacent: he is an energetic, short and relaxed man,
but one who talks with some diffidence. His manner as the steersman of two
great vessels of the Establishment is that of the competent if slightly
surprised administrator, and he is certainly not dull.

In terms of his offices his closest resemblence is with Sir Isaac Newton,
who was both student and professor of mathematics at Trinity, a Fellow of
the Royal Society and its president. But he was never Master of Trinity;
his choleric character saw to that. Trinity is a riot of different architectural
styles, periods and materials: its glory is Wren’s great library of warm
and mellow stone. The whole sleeps quietly in the autumn sun with every
sign of content. The master’s lodge looks onto the Great Court, its interior
of dark panelling covered by portraits of successive masters. Amid all the
trails of educational life today it is easy to see that the college is secure
and apparently serene. By contrast the Royal Society is housed in one of
John Nash’s greatest facades – Carlton House Terrace, full of public grandeur
but also rather cavernous behind its exterior.

Atiyah was born in Britain and his mathematical genius was evident early
on. The son of a Lebanese father and an English mother, he was schooled
in Egypt, where he dodged bombs during the Second World War and heard the
barrage at El Alamein. His father, a public servant who became a well-known
BBC broadcaster and commentator on Middle East affairs, enquired of the
best school in Britain for aspiring mathematicians. He was told manchester
Grammar, and it was there that the young Atiyah went for one intensive,
difficult year of cramming before going to Trinity as a student. It was
the college to which Manchester Grammar sent all its brightest mathemeticians.

‘I had vague hopes and ambitions for a career as a mathematician, but
I did not know how things were going to work out at first. Anyway that was
what I became, first as a research student then as a research fellow. I
was doing some teaching as well, and I enjoyed it. If you are doing 20 years’
teaching, having to do the same stuff over and over again it becomes a bore.

‘But when you start off as a research fellow your time is free, you
have nothing to do but think, so it’s easy to find about six hours a week
to teach .. light relief from thinking.’

At Trinity, Atiyah was in a mathematical nirvana. The tradition started
with Isaac Newton, althogh until Atiyah arrived there had been only one
mathematician who became Master of the College – Robert Smith in 1742. Newton,
despite his abrasive personality, attracted disciples, and Trinity began
its long history as a mathematical centre. With other colleges and universities
it was somnolent in the 18th century, but came alive again in the 19th.
Within the past 100 years Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead wrote
Principia Mathematica there, a brilliant work of mathematical logic. Another
academically famous pair of the 1920s and 30s were G H Hardy and E L Littlewood.
‘Hardy and Littlewood were like Marks & Spencer, a couple who worked
as callaborators. Hardy was a big figure in number theory and analysis,’
said Atiyah.

He received his doctorate in 1955 and decided to go abroad: such was
his acumen that he got a fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies
at Princeton, who founders included Albert Einstein and John von Neumann.
‘It’s always a good idea to get away from your own university and go elsewhere,’
said Atiyah. ‘At that time going to America was the obvious thing to do
to get new ideas, meet new people and open up new avenues. For a long time
Princeton was one of the few places where young people could go from all
parts of the world to congregate and mix.’

Research in theoretical mathematics is the cultural version of the north
face of Everest – hard, lonely and calling for much courage – but it does
have some advantages. Unlike arts research, it does not require old manuscripts
and large libraries; unlike scientific research it does not require large
laboratories. All that’s involved is a room, a desk, a chair and a salary.
‘You learn about what’s been done, get up in the front line of current though
and ideas, then you sit and think. It’s very demanding but comparatively
³¦³ó±ð²¹±è.’

Atiyah was made a Fellow of the Royal Society when he was 33 – mathematicians
are notorious for doing their best work when very young. ‘If you haven’t
produced some outstanding work by the time you’re 30 you are unlikely to
do so. There are various reasons why you do your original work when young.
In maths experience doesn’t matter so much; originality and freshness are
the most important things, together with the sheer intellectual power of
concentration. The degree of concentration you need at the highest levels
of mathematical thought is probably unique. It’s really like focusing an
intense beam of light on something. If people are in their early 20s, if
they are really involved in a problem, they can think about it for hours
and days on end, keeping the whole problem in their minds. That kind of
intensity you can’t maintain 20 years on. They tell you that your grey cells
start to decline at 18. Of course there are plenty of other things you can
do later on.’ Like running Trinity and the Royal Society.

It was for original work at the highest level that Atiyah was awarded
the Fields Medal in 1966, when he was 37. The Fields is the mathematical
equivalent of the Nobel prize – there is no Nobel awarded for mathematics.
Atiyah described this period in his life: ‘It required very hard work, hard
though, a lot of which you do on your own. But you want to exchange ideas
with somebody else, if you can get someone who is sufficiently close to
your own interests; you work together and argue between yourselves – it’s
a very powerful way of working. It isn’t like experimental work where you
get papers written by about 50 peope, each contributing their own little
bit: a typical maths paper has one, two or three authors. You have a lot
of exchange of ideas and you make a lot of progress that way. Mathematical
work is so specialised that few other people can read it, so mathematicians
tend to publish in their own journals.’

The middle years of Atiyah’s life have been lived at a fairly breathless
pace. First he went from Cambridge to Princeton for a term each year and
he was visiting lecturer at Harvard between 1962 and 1963. For six years
he was at New College, Oxford, as fellow and professor of geometry, they
he wen back to Princeton as professor of mathematics from 1969 to 1972.
From 1973, he came back, not to Cambridge, but the Oxford as Royal Society
Professor at the Mathematical Institute. Life has also been filled with
committees of every kind, perhaps the most important of which was within
the Science and Engineering Research Council evaluating proposals and setting
grants; he has subsequently become a member of the SERC Council, responsible
for overseeing science policy as a whole. As well as the Fields he has been
awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, and a score of other honours
on the international scene. This autumn he returned in triumph to Trinity
after 17 years at Oxford.

For someone at the leading edge of his field, Atiyah struck me as having
one curious lacuna: ‘It’s a very interesting question. I belong to the pre-computer
generation. I don’t really use them myself. Mathematicians were much involved
in the early days, but for theoretical or conceptional work they don’t have
much of a role. I have worked with collaborators who use computers and I
have quite enjoyed that. For most of the things I have done in the past
computers couldn’t have been helpful. To people in other parts of mathematics
they are more useful. They play a big part for people doing applied maths
– the big number crunchers. However, things have changed quite radically
in the past five or ten years: computers can now do much theoretical stuff,
they can do much more complicated algebraical calculations .. The younger
generation are now trained in computers, of course; they’re available on
their desks and they’re beginning to have an impact on theoretical maths,
the advent of these cheap, high-powered computers.’

About the state of maths today Atiyah is both optimistic and cautious.
‘As a study it’s flourishing .. It’s a very popular A-level, often taken
with another subject. One of my sons took maths and arts. Some people like
maths but don’t want to do physics or chemistry. Girls especially who don’t
want to do the sciences take maths with arts subjects, or go on to economics.
It’s a good partner with other degrees and it’s a good thing to keep up.
After maths at university many now go into the financial world or become
actuaries. Many will go into other fields and simply think of maths as an
±ð»å³Ü³¦²¹³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô.’

The maths crisis in schools is a lot more worrying. ‘The causes are
well known and complex. Low salaries, certainly, but also status and respect
are owed to maths teachers. People have been saying these thing for years.
A maths degree is useful generally and people get very well paid outside
of the profession. So teachers say ‘why stay?’. There was a time at Oxford
when you could depend on 10 per cent of your graduates going into teaching.
Now it is 1 per cent.

‘But maths underpins all the sciences and increasingly biology as well.
The current shortage of teachers is very serious. If people are not properly
trained in mathematics at school they cannot go on to large parts of scientific
work later on.’

At the time when most people start to think of retirement, Atiyah is
ensuring full employment as far ahead as he can see. Apart from running
Trinity and the Royal Society, he is planning to open the Isaac Newton Institute
for Mathematical Studies in Cambridge. IT will have no staff apart from
himself and a deputy. Maths researchers and some postgraduate students will
work at the institute for six months at a time, studying topics which they
have chosen in advance.

I have never met in any corridor of power anyone who looked and sounded
less like one of C P Snow’s gravely self-important characters. I intend
that as a compliment.

Glyn Jones is a freelance writer and television producer.