1. William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician.
20 Facts About William Thurston
1. 2.
William Thurston was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
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William Thurston was a director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
4.
William Thurston was born in Washington, DC, to Margaret Thurston, a seamstress, and Paul Thurston, an aeronautical engineer.
5.
William Thurston suffered from congenital strabismus as a child, causing issues with depth perception.
6.
William Thurston's mother worked with him as a toddler to reconstruct three-dimensional images from two-dimensional ones.
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William Thurston received his bachelor's degree from New College in 1967 as part of its inaugural class.
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In 1974, William Thurston was appointed a full professor at Princeton University.
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William Thurston returned to Berkeley in 1991 to be a professor and was director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute from 1992 to 1997.
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William Thurston was on the faculty at UC Davis from 1996 until 2003, when he moved to Cornell University.
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William Thurston was an early adopter of computing in pure mathematics research.
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William Thurston inspired Jeffrey Weeks to develop the SnapPea computing program.
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William Thurston resolved so many outstanding problems in foliation theory in such a short period of time that it led to an exodus from the field, where advisors counselled students against going into foliation theory, because William Thurston was "cleaning out the subject".
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William Thurston showed that the figure-eight knot complement could be decomposed as the union of two regular ideal hyperbolic tetrahedra whose hyperbolic structures matched up correctly and gave the hyperbolic structure on the figure-eight knot complement.
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William Thurston proved that in fact most Dehn fillings on a cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold resulted in hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
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Two teams of mathematicians around 2000 finally finished their efforts to write down a complete proof, based mostly on William Thurston's lectures given in the early 1980s in Princeton.
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In 2005, William Thurston won the first American Mathematical Society Book Prize, for Three-dimensional Geometry and Topology.
18.
William Thurston was awarded the 2012 Leroy P Steele Prize by the American Mathematical Society for seminal contribution to research.
19.
William Thurston had two children with his second wife, Julian Muriel William Thurston: Hannah Jade and Liam.
20.
William Thurston died on August 21,2012, in Rochester, New York, of a sinus mucosal melanoma that was diagnosed in 2011.