Mathematician:William Paul Thurston
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Mathematician
American mathematician who specialised in low-dimensional topology.
Won the Fields Medal in 1982 for his work on $3$-manifolds.
Fields Medal
William Paul Thurston was awarded a Fields Medal in $\text {1982}$ at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Warsaw, Poland:
- Revolutionized study of topology in $2$ and $3$ dimensions, showing interplay between analysis, topology, and geometry. Contributed the idea that a very large class of closed $3$-manifolds carry a hyperbolic structure.
Nationality
American
History
- Born: 30 October 1946 in Washington, D.C., USA
- Died: 21 August 2012 in Rochester, New York, USA
Theorems and Definitions
- Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture (solved in $2003$ by Grigori Perelman)
- Milnor-Thurston Kneading Theory (with John Willard Milnor)
- Misiurewicz-Thurston Points (with Michał Misiurewicz)
- Thurston's Double Limit Theorem
- Nielsen-Thurston Classification (with Jakob Nielsen)
- Earthquake Theorem
- Koebe-Andreev-Thurston Theorem (with Paul Koebe and E.M. Andreev) (also known as the Circle Packing Theorem)
Results named for William Paul Thurston can be found here.
Publications
- 1978 -- 81: The geometry and topology of three-manifolds
- 1982: Three-dimensional manifolds, Kleinian groups and hyperbolic geometry (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Vol. 6: pp. 357 – 381)
- 1986: Hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds. I. Deformation of acylindrical manifolds (Ann. Math. Vol. 124, no. 2: pp. 203 – 246)
- 1988: On the geometry and dynamics of diffeomorphisms of surfaces (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Vol. 19, no. 2: pp. 417 – 431)
- September 1990: Mathematical education (Notices of the AMS Vol. 37:7: pp. 844 – 850)
- 1990: More mathematical people
- 1994: On proof and progress in mathematics (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. Vol. 30: pp. 161 – 177)
Notable Quotes
- I think mathematics is a vast territory. The outskirts of mathematics are the outskirts of mathematical civilization. There are certain subjects that people learn about and gather together. Then there is a sort of inevitable development in those fields. You get to a point where a certain theorem is bound to be proved, independent of any particular individual, because it is just in the path of development.
- -- More mathematical people, $1990$
Sources
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson: "William Paul Thurston": MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
- 2008: David Joyner: Adventures in Group Theory (2nd ed.) ... (previous) ... (next): Chapter $2$: 'And you do addition?': $\S 2.2$: Functions on vectors: $\S 2.2.5$: Determinants