Michael Freedman

Michael Hartley Freedman is a mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His team is involved in the development of the topological quantum computer. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the 4-dimensional generalized Poincaré conjecture.

Freedman entered UCSB as an undergraduate but dropped out after two semesters. In the same year he wrote a letter to Ralph Fox, a Princeton professor at the time, and was admitted to graduate school, so in 1968 he continued his studies at Princeton University where he received Ph.D. in 1973. After graduating, Freedman returned to UCSB, where he was a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics until 1975. He left UCSB to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in 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 1980-1981 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 awards and honors including Sloan and Guggenheim Fellowships, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Medal of Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Mathematical Society. In addition to winning a Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1986 in Berkeley, he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1983 in Warsaw and at the ICM in 1998 in Berlin.