Raoul Bott was a Hungarian-American mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He was born on September 24, 1923 in Budapest, Hungary. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel-Bott-Weil theorem. He studied engineering at McGill University in Montreal, then received his Ph.D. in science from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. He joined Harvards faculty in 1959. He has taught at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the University of Michigan, and the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in France. In 1990, the American Mathematical Society awarded Dr. Bott its Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. He received the National Medal of Science in 1987 and won the Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics in 2000. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.