Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
,
CaliforniaCalifornia is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
,
U.S.The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
) is a
mathematicianA mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the
University of California, Santa BarbaraThe University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
. In 1986, he was awarded a
Fields MedalThe Fields Medal, officially known as International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics, is a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over 40 years of age at each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union , a meeting that takes place every four...
for his work on the
Poincaré conjectureIn mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the three-dimensional sphere , which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space...
. Freedman and
Robion KirbyRobion Cromwell Kirby is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in low-dimensional topology...
showed that an
exotic R4In mathematics, an exotic R4 is a differentiable manifold that is homeomorphic to the Euclidean space R4, but not diffeomorphic.The first examples were found by Robion Kirby and Michael Freedman, by using the contrast between Freedman's theorems about topological 4-manifolds, and Simon Donaldson's...
manifold exists.
Freedman was born in Los Angeles. His father, Benedict Freedman, was an aeronautical engineer, musician, and writer. His mother, Nancy Mars, performed as an actress and also trained as an artist. His parents cowrote a series of novels together. He entered the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, in 1968, and continued his studies at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
where he received
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated as Ph.D., PhD, D.Phil., or DPhil , in English-speaking countries, is a postgraduate academic degree awarded by universities...
degree in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled
Codimension-Two Surgery, written under the supervision of
William BrowderWilliam Browder is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry...
. After graduating, Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. He held this post from 1973 until 1975, when he became a member of the
Institute for Advanced StudyThe Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...
(IAS) at Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the
University of California, San DiegoThe University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...
(UCSD). He spent the year 1980/81 at IAS, returning to UCSD, where in 1982 he was promoted to professor. He was appointed the Charles Lee Powell chair of mathematics at UCSD in 1985.
Freedman has received numerous other awards and honors including
SloanThe Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This is distinct from the Sloan Fellows in business....
and
Guggenheim FellowshipGuggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...
s, a
MacArthur FellowshipThe MacArthur Fellows Program or MacArthur Fellowship is an award given by the John D. and Catherine T...
and the
National Medal of ScienceThe National Medal of Science is an honor bestowed by the President of the United States to individuals in science and engineering who have made important contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the fields of behavioral and social sciences, biology, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and...
. He is an elected member of the
National Academy of SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
, and the
American Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
.
He currently works at Microsoft Station Q at the
University of California, Santa BarbaraThe University of California, Santa Barbara, commonly known as UCSB or UC Santa Barbara, is a public research university and one of the 10 general campuses of the University of California system. The main campus is located on a site in Goleta, California, from Santa Barbara and northwest of Los...
, where his team is involved in the development of the
topological quantum computerA topological quantum computer is a theoretical quantum computer that employs two-dimensional quasiparticles called anyons, whose world lines cross over one another to form braids in a three-dimensional spacetime . These braids form the logic gates that make up the computer...
.
Publications
- Michael H. Freedman and Frank Quinn
Frank Stringfellow Quinn, III is an American mathematician and professor of mathematics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, specializing in geometric topology. He contributed to the mathematical field of 4-manifolds, including a proof of the 4-dimensional annulus theorem...
, Topology of 4-manifolds, Princeton Mathematical Series, vol 39, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990. ISBN 0-691-08577-3
- Freedman, Michael H.: Z2-systolic-freedom. Proceedings of the Kirbyfest (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 113–123 (electronic), Geom. Topol. Monogr., 2, Geom. Topol. Publ., Coventry, 1999.
- Freedman, Michael H.; Meyer, David A.; Luo, Feng: Z2-systolic freedom
In differential geometry, systolic freedom refers to the fact that closed Riemannian manifolds may have arbitrarily small volume regardless of their systolic invariants....
and quantum codes. Mathematics of quantum computation, 287–320, Comput. Math. Ser., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2002.
External links