Michael Freedman

Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R manifold exists. Freedman was born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, and continued his studies at Princeton University where he receive... more

Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in Los Angeles, California, U.S.) is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R manifold exists. Freedman was born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, in 1968, and continued his studies at Princeton University where he received Ph.D. degree 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 (IAS) 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 IAS,... less