Book Michael Freedman

Michael Freedman is an American mathematician and Fields Medal winner whose work reshaped the study of four-dimensional spaces. Born in Los Angeles, he left UC Berkeley after two semesters, wrote directly to Princeton professor Ralph Fox and was admitted to graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in 1973 with a dissertation titled Codimension-Two Surgery under William Browder. He lectured at Berkeley, became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and joined the faculty of UC San Diego in 1976, rising to professor in 1982 and holding the Charles Lee Powell chair from 1985. In 1986 he received the Fields Medal, mathematics' top honor for younger researchers, for his proof of the four-dimensional generalized Poincaré conjecture and his classification of four-dimensional manifolds; with Robion Kirby he also showed that an exotic version of four-dimensional space exists. His honors include the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1986), the National Medal of Science (1987), Sloan, MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, and fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He later led Microsoft's Station Q research group at UC Santa Barbara, focused on topological quantum computing.