Michael Freedman

About

Michael Freedman was a Distinguished Scientist with MSR-NE and the Founding Director of Microsoft Quantum – Santa Barbara (Station Q), Microsoft’s long-running research program on quantum physics and quantum computation located on the UCSB campus. The effort forged deep collaborations between Microsoft and academia to advance the mathematical theory and physical foundations of quantum computing.

Freedman joined Microsoft in 1997 as a Fields Medal–winning mathematician whose prior accomplishments included a proof of the 4-dimensional Poincaré conjecture, the discovery (with Donaldson and Kirby) of exotic smooth structures on Euclidean 4-space, applications of minimal surfaces to topology, and estimates for the stored energy in magnetic fields. Over the course of his career he received the Fields Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Veblen Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and election to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work at Microsoft focused on the interface of quantum computation, solid-state physics, and quantum topology.

Following his retirement from Microsoft, Freedman has continued to work at the frontier of foundational methods in computation. He now serves as Chief Mathematician at Logical Intelligence, a research startup uniting Lean-style formal reasoning with large language models, while also holding a half-time research appointment at Harvard’s Center for Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA).