Book 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 mathematical fields, from foliations, contact structures, and Teichm ller 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. What's Next? brings together many of today's leading mathematicians to describe recent advances and future directions inspired by Thurston's transformative ideas. Including valuable insights from his colleagues and former students, What's Next? discusses Thurston's fundamental contributions to topology, geometry, and dynamical systems and includes many deep and original contributions to the field. This incisive and wide-ranging book also explores how he introduced new ways of thinking about and doing mathematics, innovations that have had a profound and lasting impact on the mathematical community as a whole.