Stephen Smale

Stephen Smale was born in Flint, Michigan in 1930. At the age of five he lived on a farm while his father worked in the city for General Motors. For eight years Stephen attended elementary school and afterwards, he studied at high school where his favourite subject was chemistry.When he entered in the University of Michigan he was interested in physics, but after failing a course, he changed to mathematics. Smale finally earned his Ph.D. in 1957.

His career began as an instructor in the University of Chicago from 1956 until 1958. In 1958, he firstly astounded the world with a proof of a sphere aversion. In that year, he also learnt about Pontryagin's work on structurally stable vector fields and he began to apply topological methods to study the these problems.

Between 1958 and 1960 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton on a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. He was allowed to study chaotic phenomena.

In 1960 Smale was appointed an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley, moving to a professorship at Columbia University the following year. In 1964 he returned to a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley where he has spent the main part of his career. He retired from Berkeley in 1995 and took up a post as professor at the City University of Hong Kong.

Smale's impressive results was his work on the generalised Poincaré conjecture, which is one of the famous problems of 20^th-century mathematics, but another areas in which Smale has contributed enormously is in Morse theory which he has applied to multiple integral problems, and in strange attractors.

He has won Fields Medal, National Medal of Science and Wolf Prize in addition to other prizes and honorary degrees.

Ludovica Russo and Paula Cascante