Michael Freedman

Michael Freedman
Michael Freedman in 2010
Born	Michael Hartley Freedman April 21, 1951 (1951-04-21) (age 65) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Microsoft Station Q UC Santa Barbara UC San Diego Institute for Advanced Study UC Berkeley
Alma mater	Princeton University University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral advisor	William Browder
Doctoral students	Ian Agol Feng Luo
Known for	Work on the Poincaré conjecture in dimension 4
Notable awards	Sloan Fellowship (1980) MacArthur Fellowship (1984) Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry (1986) Fields Medal (1986) National Medal of Science (1987) Guggenheim Fellowship (1994)

Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951) is an American mathematician, at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R⁴ manifold exists.

Freedman was born in Los Angeles, California, U.S. His father, Benedict Freedman, was an aeronautical engineer, musician, writer, and mathematician. His mother, Nancy Mars Freedman, performed as an actress and also trained as an artist. His parents cowrote a series of novels together. 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, 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.