Michael Freedman

Michael Hartley Freedman (born 21 April 1951 in Los Angeles) 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 Freedman classification named after him and subsequently the 4-dimensional generalized Poincaré conjecture, and with Robion Kirby he showed that an exotic R4 manifold exists. His father Benedict Freedman was an American Jewish aeronautical engineer, musician, writer and mathematician, and his mother Nancy Mars Freedman was an actress and artist. He entered the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out after two semesters, wrote a letter to Ralph Fox, and was admitted to the graduate school at Princeton University. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.