Daniel S. Freed

Daniel Freed is the Shiing-Shen Chern Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He is also Director of the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications. He received his BA and MA 1981 from Harvard University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985 under the supervision of Isadore Singer. While holding a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he was also a Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Subsequently, Freed was an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, where he remained until 2023.

Freed has broad mathematical interests in geometry. He has made several contributions to the geometric theory of Dirac operators and related topics in global analysis and topology, as well as to infinite dimensional representation theory. Since his graduate student days, he has also worked with physicists on geometric and topological problems in quantum field theory, string theory, and most recently theoretical condensed matter physics. His current mathematical work is on topics in geometry and topology arising in part from physics and on new applications of topology to physics. He is a Principal Investigator of the Simons Collaboration on Global Categorical Symmetries.

Freed has written more than 80 research papers and has co-authored and co-edited several books. His awards include a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Senior Berwick Prize of the London Mathematical Society. He is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Freed was one of the founders of what is now the Park City/IAS Mathematics Institute. He currently serves on the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and he is a Trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics and of the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute.