Segal was educated at the
University of Sydney, where he received his
BSc degree in 1961. He went on to receive his
D.Phil. in 1967 from
St Catherine's College, Oxford; his thesis, written under the supervision of
Michael Atiyah, was titled
Equivariant K-theory. His thesis was in the area of equivariant
K-theory. The
Atiyah–Segal completion theorem in that subject was a major motivation for the
Segal conjecture, which he formulated. He has made many other contributions to
homotopy theory in the past four decades, including an approach to
infinite loop spaces. He was also a pioneer of
elliptic cohomology, which is related to his interest in
topological quantum field theory. Segal was an Invited Speaker at the
ICM in 1970 in Nice and in 1990 in Kyoto. He taught at Oxford University from 1964 to 1990, then became the
Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at the
University of Cambridge from 1990 to 1999, and then a Senior Research Fellow of
All Souls College, Oxford from 1999 to 2009. He was elected the President of the
London Mathematical Society in 2011. He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982 and was awarded the
Sylvester Medal by the Royal Society in 2010. He is married to writer
Marina Warner. They live in
London. == Books==