Michael Hartley Freedman is an American mathematician, at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1986, he was awarded a Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré conjecture. Freedman and Robion Kirby showed that an exotic R4 manifold exists. He was born on April 21, 1951 in Los Angeles, California, United States. He received his Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled Codimension-Two Surgery. After graduating, Freedman was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley from 1973 until 1975, when he became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Freedman has received numerous other awards and honors including the Veblen prize, a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Medal of Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His main research interest is topological states of matter and the construction of mathematical models which illuminate these.