Isadore Singer

Isadore Singer was an American mathematician and university teacher born in Detroit in 1924. He worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the United States Army Signal Corps. His academic training included studies at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, where Irving Segal served as his doctoral advisor. Singer’s fields of work encompassed mathematics, differential topology, differential geometry, and physics.

He received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Abel Prize, the National Medal of Science, and the Wigner Medal. Singer was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He had an Erdős number of 3 and mentored doctoral students including John Lott, Linda Preiss Rothschild, Nancy Stanton, and Richard L. Bishop. Singer died in Boxborough in 2021.