Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the municipality 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 the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
,
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 and/or research is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with particular problems related to logic, space, transformations, numbers and more general ideas which encompass these concepts...
at Microsoft Station Q. In 1986, he was awarded a
Fields MedalThe Fields Medal 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 years. The Fields Medal is often viewed as the top honor a mathematician can receive. It...
for his work on the
Poincaré conjectureIn mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the three-dimensional sphere among three-dimensional manifolds. It began as a popular, important conjecture, but is now considered a theorem to the satisfaction of the awarders of the Fields medal...
. 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....
manifold exists.
Freedman was born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He entered the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
, in 1968, and continued his studies at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
where he received
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced 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 a United States mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Son of Earl Browder, brother of Felix Browder....
.
Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in
Los AngelesLos Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the municipality 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 the most populous state in the United States, and the third largest by area. California is the second most populous sub-national entity in the Americas, behind only São Paulo, Brazil...
,
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 and/or research is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with particular problems related to logic, space, transformations, numbers and more general ideas which encompass these concepts...
at Microsoft Station Q. In 1986, he was awarded a
Fields MedalThe Fields Medal 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 years. The Fields Medal is often viewed as the top honor a mathematician can receive. It...
for his work on the
Poincaré conjectureIn mathematics, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the three-dimensional sphere among three-dimensional manifolds. It began as a popular, important conjecture, but is now considered a theorem to the satisfaction of the awarders of the Fields medal...
. 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....
manifold exists.
Freedman was born into a Jewish family in Los Angeles. He entered the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
, in 1968, and continued his studies at
Princeton UniversityPrinceton University a private university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League and is considered one of the Colonial Colleges....
where he received
Ph.D.Doctor of Philosophy, abbreviated PhD , for the Latin , meaning "teacher of philosophy", or alternatively, DPhil, for the equivalent , is an advanced 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 a United States mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Son of Earl Browder, brother of Felix Browder....
. After graduating, Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the
University of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California, United States. The oldest of the ten major campuses affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley offers some 300 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines...
. 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 a center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. The Institute is perhaps best known as the academic home of Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel, after their immigration to the United...
(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 is a public research university located in La Jolla, 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".Fellowships were initially awarded in physics, chemistry, and mathematics...
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. MacArthur Foundation each year to typically 20 to 40 United States citizens or residents, of any age and working in any field, who "show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced...
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."The group holds a congressional charter under Title 36 of the United States Code....
, 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
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 Santa Barbara, California, northwest of Los Angeles...
), where his team is involved in the development of the
quantum computerA quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. The basic principle behind quantum computation is that quantum properties can be used to represent data and perform operations...
.
Publications
| year=1982 | journal=Journal of Differential Geometry | issn=0022-040X | volume=17 | issue=3 | pages=357–453}}
- Michael H. Freedman and Frank Quinn
Frank Quinn is a professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech, with seminal contributions to the mathematical field of 4-manifolds, including a proof of the 4-dimensional annulus theorem. A pioneer of the use of controlled methods...
, 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
A metric phenomenon in differential geometry, systolic freedom was first detected by Mikhail Gromov in an I.H.E.S. preprint in 1992 , and was further developed by Michael Freedman and others. Gromov's observation was elaborated on by Marcel Berger in [1]...
and quantum codes. Mathematics of quantum computation, 287--320, Comput. Math. Ser., Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton, FL, 2002.
External links