Simon Donaldson
Simon Kirwan Donaldson (1957 - ) British mathematician, perhaps famous for his work on the topology of smooth four-dimensional manifolds published when he was still a graduate student.
Earning a bachelor’s in mathematics from Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1979, Donaldson began postgraduate work at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1980. In 1983 he published the famous paper ”Self-dual connections and the topology of smooth 4-manifolds” which appeared in 1983 (the same year he got a doctorate degree from Oxford). Michael Atiyah said that that paper ”stunned the mathematical world.” In 1986, Donaldson was awarded the Fields medal, and almost a decade later, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize in mathematics with Shing-Tung Yau.