William Thurston

William Paul Thurston earned his doctorate in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley, under Morris Hirsch. In 1974, he joined the faculty of Princeton University, where his extraordinary geometric spatial intuition transformed the study of foliations, hyperbolic geometry, and 3-manifolds.

Thurston formulated the revolutionary Thurston Geometrization Conjecture in the late 1970s, postulating that all closed 3-manifolds can be decomposed into pieces carrying one of eight canonical geometric structures. This conjecture subsumed the century-old Poincaré conjecture, which was ultimately proven in 2003 by Grigori Perelman using Ricci flow.