Stephen SmaleBorn 15 Jul 1930. American mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966 for his work in topology and dynamical systems. One of his studies (1961) was on the generalised Poincaré conjecture, a famous problem of 20th-century, which asserts that a simply connected closed 3-dimensional manifold is a 3-dimensional sphere. Smale proved a higher dimensional Poincaré conjecture for an n-dimensional manifold where n is at least 5. In other work, related to strange attractors, one of the early fractals to be studied known, he discovered strange attractors which lead to chaotic dynamical systems. (An attractor in classical mechanics is a geometrical way of describing the behaviour of a dynamical system.) His recent work has been on theoretical computer science. |
