William Browder

William Browder (1934 to 2025) was an American mathematician who specialised in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Born in New York City, the youngest of three sons and a brother of the mathematicians Felix and Andrew Browder, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and took his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1958 under John Coleman Moore, with a thesis on the homology of loop spaces. He taught at Rochester and Cornell and from 1964 was a professor at Princeton. He was one of the inventors of surgery theory, which unifies methods from several branches of topology, spoke at the International Congresses of Mathematicians in 1966 and 1970, and served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.