Rate My Professor William Thurston

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.