Freedman was born in
Los Angeles,
California, in the
United States. His father,
Benedict Freedman, was an American Jewish aeronautical engineer, musician, writer, and mathematician. His parents cowrote a series of novels together. He entered the
University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out after two semesters. In the same year he wrote a letter to
Ralph Fox, a
Princeton University professor at the time, and was admitted to the university's graduate school, where in 1968 he continued his studies and received a
Ph.D. in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled
Codimension-Two Surgery, written under the supervision of
William Browder. After graduating, Freedman returned to
Berkeley, where he was a lecturer in the department of mathematics until 1975. He left Berkeley to become a member of the
Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the department of mathematics at the
University of California, San Diego. He spent the year 1980/81 at IAS, then returned to UCSD, where in 1982 he was promoted to professor. He was appointed the Charles Lee Powell chair of mathematics at UCSD in 1985. Freedman has received numerous awards and honors including
Sloan and
Guggenheim Fellowships, a
MacArthur Fellowship, and the
National Medal of Science. He is an elected member of the
National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the
American Mathematical Society. In addition to winning a
Fields Medal at the
International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 1986 in Berkeley, he was an Invited Speaker at the ICM in 1983 in
Warsaw and at the ICM in 1998 in
Berlin. He currently works at
Microsoft Station Q at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, where his team is involved in the development of the
topological quantum computer. ==Publications==