Raoul Bott was born in Budapest in 1923, emigrated after a peripatetic wartime adolescence, and eventually joined the Harvard faculty, where his 1959 periodicity theorem — now called the Bott periodicity theorem — reshaped algebraic topology. Hungary has a long tradition of commemorating expatriate mathematicians a generation or more after their contributions became foundational, and Bott, who died in 2005, fits squarely into that pattern.
Raoul Bott was born in Budapest in 1923, emigrated after a peripatetic wartime adolescence, and eventually joined the Harvard faculty, where his 1959 periodicity theorem — now called the Bott periodicity theorem — reshaped algebraic topology. Hungary has a long tradition of commemorating expatriate mathematicians a generation or more after their contributions became foundational, and Bott, who died in 2005, fits squarely into that pattern.