William Thurston

William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician, born in Washington, D.C., on 30 October 1946, and a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds. He received his bachelor's degree from New College in 1967 and his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972 under Morris Hirsch, and he was a professor at Princeton University, the University of California, Davis, and Cornell University, and a director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1992 to 1997. His early work resolved many problems in foliation theory, and from the mid 1970s he showed that hyperbolic geometry plays a far more important role in the theory of 3-manifolds than had been realised, which led him to formulate his geometrization conjecture. He died on 21 August 2012.