William Browder (mathematician)
William Browder | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 6, 1934 |
| Nationality | United States |
| Alma mater | Princeton University Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | Surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds. |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions | Princeton University |
| Doctoral advisor | John Coleman Moore |
| Doctoral students | Alejandro Adem Sylvain Cappell Michael Freedman Louis Kauffman George Lusztig William Pardon Ted Petrie Frank Quinn Dennis Sullivan John Wagoner Elmar Winkelnkemper Tadashi Tokieda |
William Browder (born January 6, 1934)[1][2] is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Browder was one of the pioneers with Sergei Novikov, Dennis Sullivan and Terry Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds.
Life and career
Browder is the son of Raissa (née Berkmann) and former American Communist Party leader Earl Browder, and the brother of the mathematicians Felix Browder and Andrew Browder. His mother was a Jewish immigrant from St. Petersburg, Russia, and his father was from Wichita, Kansas.[3] He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.) in 1954 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, with a dissertation entitled Homology of Loop Spaces, advised by John Coleman Moore.[2][4] Since 1964 he has been a professor at Princeton University; he was chair of the mathematics department at Princeton from 1971 to 1973. He was editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics from 1969 to 1981, and president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.[2]
Browder was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1980, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984, and the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.[2] In 1994 a conference was held at Princeton in celebration of his 60th birthday.[1] In 2012 a conference was held at Princeton on the occasion of his retirement.[5]
Selected bibliography
- Books
- "Surgery on Simply-Connected Manifolds", Ergebnisse series 65, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1972)
- "Algebraic Topology and Algebraic K-Theory", Princeton University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-691-08426-2
- Seminal papers
- "Homotopy Type of Differentiable Manifolds", Proc. 1962 Aarhus Conference, published in Proc. 1993
- Oberwolfach Novikov Conjecture Conference proceedings, LMS Lecture Notes 226 (1995)
- "The Kervaire invariant of framed manifolds and its generalization", Ann. of Math. 90, 157–186 (1969)
References
- ^ a b Quinn, Frank, ed. (1995), Prospects in topology: proceedings of a conference in honor of William Browder, Annals of mathematics studies, vol. 138, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-02728-9.
- ^ a b c d Curriculum vitae from Browder's web site, retrieved 2010-10-06.
- ^ http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Browder_William.html
- ^ William Browder at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ http://web.math.princeton.edu/conference/browder2012/index.html
External links
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "William Browder", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- William Browder (AMS brief bio)
- Browder, William, "My life in mathematics: How I became a mathematician and the milestones of my career" (2012 video)
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Other | |
- 1934 births
- 20th-century American mathematicians
- 21st-century American mathematicians
- Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Living people
- American people of Russian-Jewish descent
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
- Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Presidents of the American Mathematical Society
- Princeton University alumni, 1950–59
- Princeton University faculty
- Topologists
- Guggenheim Fellows