Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton is an American mathematician who introduced the Ricci flow in 1982, establishing the field of geometric analysis as a tool for topological classification. His work demonstrated that the heat-equation analogy could be extended to Riemannian metrics, transforming curvature into a dynamical variable. Hamilton's program of Ricci flow with surgery, though incomplete in his hands, provided the framework that Grigori Perelman later completed to prove the geometrization conjecture.