William Paul Thurston
Born: 30 Oct 1946 in Washington, D.C., USA
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Bill Thurston studied at New College, Sarasota, Florida. He received his B.S. from there in 1967 and moved to the University of California at Berkeley to undertake research under Morris Hirsch's and Stephen Smale's supervision. He was awarded his doctorate in 1972 for a thesis entitled Foliations of 3-manifolds which are circle bundles. This work showed the existence of compact leaves in foliations of 3-dimensional manifolds.
After completing his Ph.D., Thurston spent the academic year 1972-73 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Then, in 1973, he was appointed an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1974 he was appointed professor of mathematics at Princeton University.
Throughout this period Thurston worked on foliations. Lawson ([5]) sums up this work:-
It is evident that Thurston's contributions to the field of foliations are of considerable depth. However, what sets them apart is their marvellous originality. This is also true of his subsequent work on Teichmüller space and the theory of 3-manifolds.
In [8] Wall describes Thurston's contributions which led to him being awarded a Fields Medal in 1982. In fact the1982 Fields Medals were announced at a meeting of the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union in Warsaw in early August 1982. They were not presented until the International Congress in Warsaw which could not be held in 1982 as scheduled and was delayed until the following year. Lectures on the work of Thurston which led to his receiving the Medal were made at the 1983 International Congress. Wall, giving that address, said:-
Thurston has fantastic geometric insight and vision: his ideas have completely revolutionised the study of topology in 2 and 3 dimensions, and brought about a new and fruitful interplay between analysis, topology and geometry.
Wall [8] goes on to describe Thurston's work in more detail:-
The central new idea is that a very large class of closed 3-manifolds should carry a hyperbolic structure - be the quotient of hyperbolic space by a discrete group of isometries, or equivalently, carry a metric of constant negative curvature. Although this is a natural analogue of the situation for 2-manifolds, where such a result is given by Riemann's uniformisation theorem, it is much less plausible - even counter-intuitive - in the 3-dimensional situation.
Kleinian groups, which are discrete isometry groups of hyperbolic 3-space, were first studied by Poincaré and a fundamental finiteness theorem was proved by Ahlfors. Thurston's work on Kleinian groups yielded many new results and established a well known conjecture. Sullivan describes this geometrical work in [6], giving the following summary:-
Thurston's results are surprising and beautiful. The method is a new level of geometrical analysis - in the sense of powerful geometrical estimation on the one hand, and spatial visualisation and imagination on the other, which are truly remarkable.
Thurston's work is summarised by Wall [8]:-
Thurston's work has had an enormous influence on 3-dimensional topology. This area has a strong tradition of 'bare hands' techniques and relatively little interaction with other subjects. Direct arguments remain essential, but 3-dimensional topology has now firmly rejoined the main stream of mathematics.
Thurston has received many honours in addition to the Fields Medal. He held a Alfred P Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1974-75. In 1976 his work on foliations led to his being awarded the Oswald Veblen Geometry Prize of the American Mathematical Society. In 1979 he was awarded the Alan T Waterman Award, being the second mathematician to receive such an award (the first being Fefferman in 1976).
Article by: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson
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List of References (9 books/articles)
| A Quotation
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| Mathematicians born in the same country
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| Honours awarded to Bill Thurston (Click below for those honoured in this way) | |
| AMS Veblen Prize | 1976 |
| Speaker at International Congress | 1978 |
| Fields Medal | 1982 |
| British Mathematical Colloquium plenary speaker | 1986 |
| Hedrick lecturer | 1987 |
| AMS Colloquium Lecturer | 1989 |
Cross-references in MacTutor
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