Michael Freedman

Michael Hartley Freedman (* April 21, 1951 in Los Angeles, California) is an American mathematician who works mainly in the topology and received the Fields Medal for his proof of the Poincaré conjecture in dimension 4.

The Poincaré conjecture states that a () -fold connected closed -dimensional manifold homeomorphic ( topologically equivalent ) is the -dimensional sphere. For this proved 1961 Stephen Smale. Freedman proved the case in 1982 and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1986. The case proved Grigory Perelman to 2002.

Freedman and Robion Kirby also showed the existence of an " exotic " variety ( that is, with other differentiable structure than the ordinary 4 -dimensional Euclidean space ).

Freedman studied at Princeton University and received his doctorate in 1973 with the dissertation codimension -Two Surgery at William Browder. He then taught until 1975 at the University of California, Berkeley. After that, he was alternately at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD ), where he became professor in 1982.

He was both Sloan, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow. He has won both the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science and the 1986 Oswald Veblen Prize - and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. In 1998 he was invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin ( Topological views on computational complexity ) and also in 1983 in Warsaw (The disk theorem for four - dimensional manifolds ). He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

From the 1990s he worked on, among other things with mathematical physics and mathematics of quantum computers, which he or she applies topological methods, and works for Microsoft Research. He is currently working at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Freedman is a passionate mountaineer. He is married and has three sons.