William Thurston
William Paul Thurston (born 1946) American mathematician, recipient of the Fields medal in 1982, perhaps best known for Thurston’s geometrization conjecture.
After earning a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, Thurston taught at MIT, Princeton (where he worked on foliation and lectured on the orbifold theorem), UC Davis. Since 2003 he has been a professor of mathematics and computer science at Cornell University.