Michael Freedman

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Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in Los Angeles, California, USA) is a mathematician at Microsoft Research. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most famous problems of the 20th century.

The Poincaré conjecture asserts that a simply connected closed 3-dimensional manifold is a 3-dimensional sphere. The higher-dimensional Poincaré conjecture claims that any closed n-manifold which is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere must be the n-sphere. When n = 3, this is equivalent to the Poincaré conjecture. Stephen Smale proved the higher dimensional Poincaré conjecture in 1961 for n at least 5. Freedman proved the conjecture for n = 4 in 1982. Grigori Perelman is thought to have recently proved the remaining case of n = 3.

Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R⁴ manifold exists.

Freedman was awarded a doctorate by Princeton University in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled Codimension-Two Surgery, written under the supervision of William Browder. After graduating, Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He held this post from 1973 until 1975 when he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He spent the year 1980/81 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton returning to UCSD where on 1982 he was promoted to professor. He was appointed the Charles Lee Powell chair of mathematics at UCSD in 1985.

He has received numerous other awards and honors including Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the New York Academy of Sciences.

He currently works at University of California, Santa Barbara (at the Microsoft funded Station Q) where his team is involved in the development of the quantum computer. He also enjoys rock climbing and spending time with his wife, Sam, and their three sons: Hartley, Whitney, and Jake.

[edit] Publications

Michael H. Freedman, The topology of four-dimensional manifolds, Journal of Differential Geometry 17 (1982), pp. 357–453
Michael H. Freedman and Frank Quinn, Topology of 4-manifolds, Princeton Mathematical Series, vol 39, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990. ISBN 0-691-08577-3