Person: Thurston, William Paul
Bill Thurston was an American mathematician who won a Fields Medal for his work on 2 and 3 dimensional manifolds.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- After completing his Ph.D., Thurston spent the academic year 1972-73 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
- Throughout this period Thurston worked on foliations.
- Lectures on the work of Thurston which led to his receiving the Medal were made at the 1983 International Congress.
- Thurston's work on Kleinian groups yielded many new results and established a well known conjecture.
- Thurston has received many honours in addition to the Fields Medal.
- In 1991, Thurston left Princeton University and returned to the University of California at Berkeley as Professor of Mathematics.
- These notes created a new circle of ideas, and the expression "Thurston type geometry" has become very common.
- Thurston's style of exposition is special in that it asks the reader to participate actively in what's going on by providing room for mental images, and this is one of the reasons why it is easy to get stuck if one tries to read these notes in a linear manner.
- For many years, Thurston was asked by many people (and it was probably also his own intention) to write a more detailed version of these notes.
- The net result that we have here is a book which is, fortunately, still written in Thurston's style, demanding the participation of the reader's imagination, but with many more details than the chapters of the Princeton 1978 notes from which it grew.
- On 6 January 2005, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia, Thurston was awarded the American Mathematical Society Book Prize for Three-dimensional geometry and topology.
- Thurston's book is nearly unique in the intuitive grasp of subtle geometric ideas that it provides.
Born 30 October 1946, Washington, D.C., USA. Died 21 August 2012, Rochester, New York, 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! 
- Github:
-
- 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
