William Browder (January 6, 1934 – February 4, 2025) was an American mathematician, who specialized in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.
William Browder | |
---|---|
![]() Browder in 1970 | |
Born | New York City, U.S. | January 6, 1934
Died | February 4, 2025 Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. | (aged 91)
Education | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS) Princeton University (MS, PhD) |
Known for | Surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds |
Father | Earl Browder |
Relatives | Felix Browder (brother) Andrew Browder (brother) Bill Browder (nephew) Joshua Browder (great-nephew) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | Princeton University |
Doctoral advisor | John Coleman Moore |
Doctoral students |
William Browder was born in a Jewish hospital in Harlem, New York City on January 6, 1934,[1][2][3] the son of Raisa (née Berkmann), a Russian Jewish 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 first two sons, Felix and Andrew, were born in Moscow in 1931.[4] William attended local public schools in Yonkers for early schooling and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. degree in 1954. He was a instructor at the University of Rochester from 1957 to 1958 and at Cornell University from 1958 until 1963. In August 1957, his original thesis fell apart when his advisor, John Coleman Moore, found an issue with the idea. However, William came up with a new idea which was titled Homology of Loop Spaces. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, using the dissertation.[2][5][3]
From 1964 onwards, Browder was 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] A conference was held at Princeton on the occasion of his retirement in 2012.[6] Browder advised 30 Ph.D. students in his career as well as multiple undergraduate students.[3]