William Paul Thurston served as the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Mathematics in the Mathematics Department at Cornell University from 2003 until his death in 2012. Born on October 30, 1946, in Washington, D.C., he earned his B.A. from New College in Sarasota, Florida, in 1967, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972, with a thesis titled "Foliations of 3-manifolds which are circle bundles." His career included an assistant professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, a professorship at Princeton University from 1974 to 1991, a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1991 to 1996, a professorship at the University of California, Davis, from 1996 to 2003, and directorship of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

A topologist, Thurston discovered unexpected links between topology, hyperbolic geometry, and complex analysis. Highlights of his research include the classification of foliations of codimension greater than one, the classification of surface automorphisms, the hyperbolization theorem in three-dimensional topology, and the theories of automatic groups and confoliations. He made fundamental contributions to the theory of symplectic and contact manifolds, dynamics of surface diffeomorphisms, combinatorics of rational maps, random 3-manifolds, and relations of knot theory to computational complexity. His geometrization conjecture proposed a far-reaching generalization of his hyperbolization theorem. Key publications are "Three-dimensional manifolds, Kleinian groups and hyperbolic geometry" (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1982), "Hyperbolic structures on 3-manifolds, I. Deformation of acylindrical manifolds" (Ann. of Math., 1986), "Word Processing in Groups" (1992), "Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology" (1997), and "Confoliations" (with Y. Eliashberg, 1998). Thurston received the Fields Medal in 1982 for revolutionizing the study of topology in two and three dimensions, the Oswald Veblen Geometry Prize in 1976, the Alan T. Waterman Award in 1979, the AMS Book Prize in 2005 for "Three-dimensional Geometry and Topology," and the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize in 2012. His work profoundly impacted low-dimensional topology and strengthened Cornell's Mathematics Department worldwide reputation in the field.

Professional Email: wpt@math.cornell.edu