Raoul Bott (September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005)[1] was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous foundational contributions to geometry in its broad sense.

His family emigrated to Canada in 1938, and subsequently he served in the Canadian Army in Europe during World War II.

With Richard Duffin at Carnegie Mellon, Bott studied existence of electronic filters corresponding to given positive-real functions.

Duffin and Bott extended earlier work by Otto Brune that requisite functions of complex frequency s could be realized by a passive network of inductors and capacitors.

The proof relied on induction on the sum of the degrees of the polynomials in the numerator and denominator of the rational function.

This led to his role as collaborator over many years with Michael Atiyah, initially via the part played by periodicity in K-theory.

Bott had 35 PhD students, including Stephen Smale, Lawrence Conlon, Daniel Quillen, Peter Landweber, Robert MacPherson, Robert W. Brooks, Robin Forman, Rama Kocherlakota, Susan Tolman, András Szenes, Kevin Corlette,[13] and Eric Weinstein.