Smale, Stephen

Stephen Smale, (born July 15, 1930, Flint, Michigan, U.S.), American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work on topology in higher dimensions.

Smale grew up in a rural area near Flint. From 1948 to 1956 he attended the University of Michigan, obtaining B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics. As an instructor at the University of Chicago from 1956 to 1958, Smale achieved notoriety by proving that there exists an eversion of the sphere (meaning, in a precise theoretical sense, that it is possible to turn a sphere inside out).

In 1960 Smale obtained his two most famous mathematical results. First he constructed a function, now known as the horseshoe, that serves as a paradigm for chaos. Next Smale proved the generalized Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to five. (The classical conjecture states that a simply connected closed three-dimensional manifold is a three-dimensional sphere, a set of points in four-dimensional space at the same distance from the origin.) The two-dimensional version of this theorem (the two-dimensional sphere is the surface of a common sphere in three-dimensional space) was established in the 19th century, and the three-dimensional version was established at the start of the 21st century. Smale’s work was remarkable in that he bypassed dimensions three and four to resolve the problem for all higher dimensions. In 1961 he followed up with the h-cobordism theorem, which became the fundamental tool for classifying different manifolds in higher-dimensional topology.

In 1965 Smale took a six-month hiatus from mathematical research to join radical activist Jerry Rubin in establishing the first campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience directed at ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Smale’s mathematical and political lives collided the following year at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow, where he received the Fields Medal. There Smale held a controversial press conference in which he criticized the actions of both the U.S. and Soviet governments.

Smale’s mathematical work is notable for both its breadth and depth, reaching the areas of topology, dynamical systems, economics, nonlinear analysis, mechanics, and computation. In 1994 Smale retired from the University of California at Berkeley and then joined the faculty of the City University of Hong Kong. In 2007 he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

Smale’s publications include Differential Equations, Dynamical Systems, and Linear Algebra (1974; with Morris W. Hirsch), The Mathematics of Time: Essays on Dynamical Systems, Economic Processes, and Related Topics (1980), and The Collected Papers of Stephen Smale (2000).