Person: Freedman, Michael Hartley
Michael Freedman is an American mathematician who won a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Benedict and Nancy Freedman are joint authors of several well-known novels.
- Michael showed exceptional talents in mathematics as he grew up.
- Freedman enjoyed playing Go and he knew that the mathematician Ralph Fox at Princeton was a champion Go player.
- After graduating Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley.
- Freedman was promoted to associate professor at San Diego in 1979.
- Freedman was awarded a Fields Medal in 1986 for his work on the Poincaré conjecture.
- Freedman's 1982 proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré hypothesis was an extraordinary tour de force.
- Freedman has received many honours for his work.
- In his paper, The topology of four-dimensional manifolds, published in the Journal of Differential Geometry (1982), Freedman solved this problem, and in particular, the four-dimensional Poincaré conjecture.
- In June 1987 Freedman was presented with the National Medal of Science at the White House by President Ronald Reagan.
- Freedman continued to hold the Charles Lee Powell Professorship of Mathematics at the University of California at San Diego until 1998 when he left the academic world to take up an appointment with Station Q, a Microsoft research group working on topological quantum computing.
- In doing so, Freedman became the first Fields Medallist to leave the academic world to work for a company.
- Freedman became the director of Station Q and to see a little of the topics that he worked on we will look at a few of the titles of the papers he has written over the succeeding ten years.
Born 21 April 1951, Los Angeles, California, USA.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Prize Fields Medal, Origin Usa, Topology
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
