UCSD Mathematical Whiz Adds Top Science Award to His Collection

LA JOLLA — Michael Freedman, UC San Diego’s oft-honored mathematics marvel, on Thursday received the country’s highest scientific award, bestowed by President Reagan in recognition of his unraveling of an 82-year-old mathematical mystery.

Freedman, 36, was one of 20 recipients of the National Medal of Science for his proof of the so-called fourth-dimensional Poincare conjecture, a problem that had baffled mathematicians for decades when Freedman proved it in 1982.

The National Science Foundation, which selected winners of the award from among 250 nominees, on Thursday characterized Freedman’s accomplishment as “one of the greatest achievements in mathematics in this century.”

Freedman received the bronze medal in a brief White House Rose Garden ceremony under a blazing sun. In addition to 20 Medals of Science, Reagan presented four National Medals of Technology.

Importance of Mathematics

Freedman, who flew to Washington to receive the medal, said earlier this week that he hoped that the fact that the award was going to a mathematician might signal an increasing awareness of the integral role of mathematics in the broad field of science.

“I think as an individual, I’m a bit tangential to the picture,” he told reporters at a special campus briefing here Tuesday. “I think that the main decision was to recognize mathematics and some of its important aspects.”

A math professor at the UC San Diego campus since 1976, Freedman was the 1986 winner of the Fields Medal, nicknamed the “Nobel Prize of mathematics.” In 1984, he won a $176,000 MacArthur Fellowship, an award given each year to “a small number of exceptionally talented individuals.”

He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences at age 33, the 1984 California Scientist of the Year and a winner of the Veblen Prize, one of the top awards in mathematics given by the American Mathematical Society.

Money Is Something New

“I think I must have hit the market at the right moment,” Freedman mused this week. “(Bernhard) Riemann, who was one of the great mathematicians of all time, lived on the edge of poverty most of his life. I think until recently, mathematicians expected no better.”

Freedman has done much of his work in the field of topology, described as a branch of mathematics that involves the study of shapes. Work in topology is currently centered on the global structure of four-dimensional spaces.

For that reason, university officials say Freedman’s work on the Poincare conjecture (named for the French mathematician Henri Poincare) could eventually affect understanding of the universe, since most models of the universe are based on four-dimensional models.

“Mathematics is really a way of thinking, and it’s a very long-term investment,” Freedman said, when asked about the practical applications of his work.

“Some parts of mathematics as they’re being developed are fairly relevant to a branch of science,” he said. “. . . But what happens normally is that an area of mathematics is developed for reasons internal to mathematics, that seems to the intuition of mathematicians that this is a fruitful set of hypotheses. . . . These ideas, once they’re developed, just kind of kick around and then find application.”

Emerged Over 2 Weeks

Freedman said the solution to the Poincare problem “kind of broke over a period of about two weeks while important chunks fell into place.” The last bit slid into focus as he was sitting in the eucalyptus groves in La Jolla above the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“And at that point, I didn’t have anything written down,” Freedman remembered. “And I realized the argument was very long--on the order of a hundred pages. And I was worried that I’d forget something important while I was trying write down something else.”

In relatively simple terms, Poincare suggested in his conjecture that it should be possible to determine whether a hypothetical surface in a four-dimensional universe is a sphere. (In this case, the four dimensions are length, depth, width and time.)

A sphere, in this instance, is not perfectly round. Instead, it is any surface that closes back upon itself without breaks or holes--such as the surface of a ball or a potato or a cucumber.

Poincare sensed intuitively that his conjecture was correct. But Freedman was able to muster the arguments to prove it.

Not Particularly Mysterious

Freedman theorized that thinking about problems may not be an especially mysterious task.

“People tend to be very pleased with themselves if they think they’re smart,” he said. “But it’s my guess that this sort of problem-solving ability, or ability to have insights, is actually just sort of an associative aspect of the memory; that you know a certain amount of things . . . and the way you have it stored will produce the next idea.

“People tend to reason not by logical deduction . . . but by analogy, I think. There are certain things they know that work. And then they see a similarity. Now they can’t put their finger on what the similarity is, usually. And in retrospect, that seems like a great insight--to see that A was similar to B.

“I think that usually it’s just an aspect of the memory. You make a lot of bad guesses that you never tell people about.”

Freedman credits his early curiosity about mathematics to his father, a former television comedy writer for Red Skelton and an amateur mathematician who later returned to school and became a math professor at Occidental College.

Father Explained Concepts

Freedman’s father, Benedict, never pushed math on his son. He would simply explain mathematical concepts and his son would ask for more. Eventually, the younger Freedman reached that point in life where, as he put it, one decides what one does best.

“And since I didn’t know anything, and you don’t have to know much to do mathematics, I decided to do mathematics,” he said.

Freedman’s mother, Nancy, is a novelist. One of his sisters is an opera singer and the other a professor at UC Irvine’s School of Medicine. An uncle, David Noel Freedman, is a widely known biblical scholar.

Freedman’s wife and two children were with him at the press briefing on Tuesday. He said he enjoys working at home and wonders whether, with two youngsters there, that may have to change.

“I certainly hope it doesn’t,” he said. “I remember seeing this great picture of Albert Einstein with little children crawling all over him when he was in his most productive period, and thinking, ‘If he could do that--what he did--with kids crawling all over him, then who am I to shut myself in my office?’ ”

Recipients of the medals awarded Thursday ranged from famed heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey to noted space researcher James Van Allen. Other Californians receiving awards were William Johnson, professor emeritus, Stanford University, for his “outstanding achievements in organic synthesis,” and H. Bolton Seed, professor of civil engineering, UC Berkeley, for his “pioneering contributions to the art and science of civil engineering.”