John Milnor

John Willard Milnor
Milnor at the Celebration of the 90th birthday of Beno Eckmann, Zürich
Born (1931-02-20) February 20, 1931 (age 93)
NationalityAmerican
Alma materPrinceton University (AB, PhD)
Known forExotic spheres
Fáry–Milnor theorem
Hauptvermutung
Milnor K-theory
Microbundle
Milnor Map, Milnor number and Milnor fibration in the theory of complex hypersurface singularities, part of singularity theory and algebraic geometry
Milnor–Thurston kneading theory
Plumbing
Milnor–Wood inequality
Surgery theory
Kervaire-Milnor theorem
Isospectral Non-Isometric compact Riemannian manifolds
Švarc–Milnor lemma
SpouseDusa McDuff
AwardsPutnam Fellow (1949, 1950)
Sloan Fellowship (1955)
Fields Medal (1962)
National Medal of Science (1967)
Leroy P. Steele Prize (1982, 2004, 2011)
Wolf Prize (1989)
Abel Prize (2011)
Lomonosov Gold Medal (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematics
InstitutionsPrinceton University, Stony Brook University
Doctoral advisorRalph Fox
Doctoral studentsTadatoshi Akiba
Jon Folkman
John Mather
Laurent C. Siebenmann
Michael Spivak

John Willard Milnor (born February 20, 1931) is an American mathematician known for his work in differential topology, algebraic K-theory and low-dimensional holomorphic dynamical systems. Milnor is a distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and the only mathematician to have won the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize, the Abel Prize and all three Steele prizes.