Description

William Thurston (1946–2012) was one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century. He was a visionary whose extraordinary ideas revolutionized a broad range of areas of mathematics, from foliations, contact structures, and Teichmüller theory to automorphisms of surfaces, hyperbolic geometry, geometrization of 3-manifolds, geometric group theory, and rational maps. In addition, he discovered connections between disciplines that led to astonishing breakthroughs in mathematical understanding as well as the creation of entirely new fields. His far-reaching questions and conjectures led to enormous progress by other researchers. In What’s Next?, many of today’s leading mathematicians describe recent advances and future directions inspired by Thurston’s transformative ideas.