1. Stephen Smale was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 and spent more than three decades on the mathematics faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently is Professor Emeritus, with research interests in algorithms, numerical analysis and global analysis.
Yet again, Stephen Smale performed poorly in his first years, earning a C average as a graduate student.
Stephen Smale finally earned his PhD in 1957, under Raoul Bott, beginning his career as an instructor at the University of Chicago.
Early in his career, Stephen Smale was involved in controversy over remarks he made regarding his work habits while proving the higher-dimensional Poincare conjecture.
In 1960, Stephen Smale received a Sloan Research Fellowship and was appointed to the Berkeley mathematics faculty, moving to a professorship at Columbia the following year.
Stephen Smale became a professor emeritus at Berkeley in 1995 and took up a post as professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
Stephen Smale amassed over the years one of the finest private mineral collections in existence.
From 2003 to 2012, Stephen Smale was a professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago; starting August 1,2009, he became a Distinguished University Professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
In 1988, Stephen Smale was the recipient of the Chauvenet Prize of the MAA.
In 2007, Stephen Smale was awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics.
Stephen Smale proved that the oriented diffeomorphism group of the two-dimensional sphere has the same homotopy type as the special orthogonal group of matrices.
Stephen Smale's theorem has been reproved and extended a few times, notably to higher dimensions in the form of the Stephen Smale conjecture, as well as to other topological types.
Stephen Smale extended his results to higher-dimensional spheres, and his doctoral student Morris Hirsch extended his work to immersions of general smooth manifolds.
Stephen Smale outlined a research program carried out by many others.
Stephen Smale is known for injecting Morse theory into mathematical economics, as well as recent explorations of various theories of computation.
Stephen Smale's list contains some of the original Hilbert problems, including the Riemann hypothesis and the second half of Hilbert's sixteenth problem, both of which are still unsolved.