Celebratio Mathematica — Freedman

Conversation with Bob Edwards on Mike Freedman’s Fields Medal work

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article M. H. Freedman: “The topology of four-dimensional manifolds,” J. Differential Geom. 17 : 3 (1982), pp. 357–453. MR 0679066 Zbl 0528.57011

Manifold topology enjoyed a golden age in the late 1950s and 1960s. Of the mysteries still remaining after that period of great success the most compelling seemed to lie in dimensions three and four. Although experience suggested that manifold theory at these dimensions has a distinct character, the dream remained since my graduate school days that some key principle from the high dimensional theory would extend, at least to dimension four, and bring with it the beautiful adherence of topology to algebra familiar in dimensions greater than or equal to five. There is such a principle. It is a homotopy theoretic criterion for imbedding (relatively) a topological 2-handle in a smooth four-dimensional manifold with boundary. The main impact is to the classification of 1-connected 4-manifolds and topological end recognition. However, certain applications to nonsimply connected problems such as knot concordance are also obtained.

book M. H. Freedman and F. Quinn: Topology of 4-manifolds. Princeton Mathematical Series 39. Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1990. MR 1201584 Zbl 0705.57001

article M. H. Freedman and P. Teichner: “4-manifold topology I: Subexponential groups,” Invent. Math. 122 : 3 (1995), pp. 509–529. MR 1359602 Zbl 0857.57017

The technical lemma underlying the 5-dimensional topological \( s \)-cobordism conjecture and the 4-dimensional topological surgery conjecture is a purely smooth category statement about locating \( \pi_1 \)-null immersions of disks. These conjectures are theorems precisely for those fundamental groups (“good groups”) where the \( \pi_1 \)-null disk lemma (NDL) holds. We expand the class of known good groups to all groups of subexponential growth and those that can be formed from these by a finite number of application of two operations: (1) extension and (2) direct limit. The finitely generated groups in thisclass are amenable and no amenable group is known to lie outside this class.