Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson FRS (born 20 August 1957) is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry.

He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York,[1] and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.

Donaldson's father was an electrical engineer in the physiology department at the University of Cambridge, and his mother earned a science degree there.

He spent the academic year 1983–84 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and returned to Oxford as Wallis Professor of Mathematics in 1985.

After spending one year visiting Stanford University,[4] he moved to Imperial College London in 1998 as Professor of Pure Mathematics.

[5] In 2014, he joined the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, United States.

In February 2006, Donaldson was awarded the King Faisal International Prize for science for his work in pure mathematical theories linked to physics, which have helped in forming an understanding of the laws of matter at a subnuclear level.

[13] In 1986, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Berkeley.

The solution by Chen, Donaldson and Sun was published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 as a three-article series, "Kähler–Einstein metrics on Fano manifolds, I, II and III".