William Browder

William Browder (born January 6, 1934) is an American mathematician, specializing in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. Browder was one of the pioneers with Sergei Novikov, Dennis Sullivan and Terry Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds.

Browder is the son of former American Communist Party leader Earl Browder and the brother of Felix Browder. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S.) in 1954 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, with a dissertation entitled Homology of Loop Spaces, advised by John Coleman Moore. Since 1964 he has been a professor at Princeton University; he was chair of the mathematics department at Princeton from 1971 to 1973. He was editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics from 1969 to 1981, and president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.

Browder was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1980, the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1984, and the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990. In 1994 a conference was held at Princeton in celebration of his 60th birthday.

Selected bibliography

Books 

"Surgery on Simply-Connected Manifolds", Ergebnisse series 65, Springer-Verlag, Berlin (1972)

"Algebraic Topology and Algebraic K-Theory", Princeton University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-691-08426-2

Seminal papers
"Homotopy Type of Differentiable Manifolds", Proc. 1962 Arhus Conference, published in Proc. 1993
Oberwolfach Novikov Conjecture Conference proceedings, LMS Lecture Notes 226 (1995)
"The Kervaire invariant of framed manifolds and its generalization", Ann. of Math.s 90, 157--186 (1969)