DATE:
July 13-15, 2020
LOCATION:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Indika Rajapakse (University of Michigan), Michael Xuan (UniData Technology), Dan Burns (University of Michigan), Michael Shub (The City College of New York)
STUDENT ORGANIZERS:
Stephen Lindsly, Can Chen, Gabrielle Dotson
ADVISORY COMMITTEE:
Brian Athey, Anthony Bloch, H. V. Jagadish, Thomas Ried, Sri Kumar
Dr. Smale was born July 15, 1930 in Flint, Michigan. He earned his Bachelor degree in 1952, Masters in 1953, and PhD in 1957, all in mathematics, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Smale was awarded the Fields Medal (1966) for his work in differential topology where he proved the generalized Poincaré conjecture in dimension greater than or equal to five.
Dr. Smale spent 1958-60 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the Instituto de Mathematica Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. In 1960, Smale was appointed associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1961 he accepted an appointment at Columbia University in New York but returned to Berkeley in 1964. Since his retirement from Berkeley in 1995, Dr. Smale has been a professor at the City University of Hong Kong.
Other awards Dr. Smale has received over the years include the Veblen Prize for Geometry by the American Mathematical Society (1966), the U.S. National Medal of Science (1996), the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America (1988), the Von Neuman Award (1989), the Jürgen Moser Prize (2005) from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2007, Dr. Smale was awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics. Dr. Smale holds seven honorary doctorates and is honorary member of the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (since 1990), the Trinity Mathematical Society in Dublin (since 1991), the Moscow Mathematical Society (since 1997), and the London Mathematical Society (since 1998).
Dr. Smale is not only known for his mathematical achievements, but also for the world-class collection of minerals that he and his wife have built up over decades.