National Medal Winner
Bott, Raoul, National Medal of Science, 1987
"...I was able to raise your question with some of my colleagues, and we unanimously agreed that the enclosed figures would be the most economical and universally significant message we cound send to an alien culture, as to the state of Mathematics. These figures encode the design of the semi-simple Lie Groups. Put in lay terms they represent the ‘perfect solids' of this century, whose constituents play a vital role in much of present day Mathematics as well as Physics."