William Browder (mathematician)

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 C. T. C. Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society until 1990.

William Browder
Born (1934-01-06) January 6, 1934
New York City, US
EducationMassachusetts Institute of Technology (BS)
Princeton University (MS, PhD)
Known forSurgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds
Parent
RelativesFelix Browder (brother)
Andrew Browder (brother)
Bill Browder (nephew)
Joshua Browder (great-nephew)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsPrinceton University
Doctoral advisorJohn Coleman Moore
Doctoral students

Life and career

William Browder was born in New York City in 1934, the son of Raisa (née Berkmann), a Jewish Russian woman from Saint Petersburg, and American Communist Party leader Earl Browder, from Wichita, Kansas. His father had moved to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he met and married Raisa. Their sons Felix Browder and Andrew Browder (born 1931) were both born there.[3] He attended local schools. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. degree 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 Browder 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 Society of Sciences and Letters 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 der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete, vol. 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, London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes 226 (1995)
  • "The Kervaire invariant of framed manifolds and its generalization", Annals of Mathematics 90, 157–186 (1969)

See also

References
  1. 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.
  2. Curriculum vitae from Browder's web site, retrieved 2010-10-06.
  3. "Browder_William biography". www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
  4. William Browder at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  5. "Panorama of Topology: A Conference in Honor of William Browder". math.princeton.edu. Princeton University Department of Mathematics. Retrieved 15 September 2018.
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