Steve Smale began his mathematical career astounding the mathematical world of topology by turning the sphere inside out and proving the generalized Poincare Conjecture and the h-Cobordism Theorem, for which he was awarded the Fields Medal. In this same period of time he  launched an infinite dimensional version of Morse-Theory, where the Palais-Smale condition is a basic tool, and revolutionized the study of dynamical systems.  His 1967 paper on Differentiable Dynamical Systems is, as David Ruelle has called it, a masterpiece of mathematical literature. Among other things it heralds a change of world view from the prevalence of fixed or periodic stable equilibria to the possibility of stably chaotic behavior.

Along the way, Smale has contributed to: celestial mechanics, where he incidentally introduced the moment map in a general setting;  mathematical economics and the prisoner’s dilemma; the theory of computation of continuous problems and the theory of equation solving where he introduced with co-authors a model of computation and complexity including the condition of a problem; and learning theory. His list of problems for the next century, compiled in the last, stimulates a vast quantity of research to this day. Most recently Smale has turned his attention to biological systems, such as genome dynamics, with the perspective that the strong stability properties of topological methods reflect well the strong stability of biological systems in noisy environments.

Steve Smale was born in Flint, Michigan on July 15, 1930. He earned his Bachelor degree in 1952, Masters in 1953, and PhD in 1957, all in mathematics, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Smale was awarded the Fields Medal in 1966.  Smale spent 1958-60 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at the Instituto de Mathematica Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro. In 1960 Smale was appointed associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1961 he accepted an appointment at Columbia University in New York but returned to Berkeley in 1964. Since his retirement from Berkeley in 1995, Dr. Smale has been a professor at the City University of Hong Kong.

Other awards Dr. Smale has received over the years include the Veblen Prize for Geometry by the American Mathematical Society (1966), the U.S. National Medal of Science (1996), the Chauvenet Prize of the Mathematical Association of America (1988), the Von Neuman Award (1989), the Jürgen Moser Prize (2005) from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. In 2007 Smale was awarded the Wolf Prize in mathematics. Smale holds seven honorary doctorates.  He has been an honorary member of the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada since 1990, of the Trinity Mathematical Society in Dublin since 1991, of the Moscow Mathematical Society since 1997, and the London Mathematical Society since 1998.

Smale is not only known for his mathematical achievements but also for the world-class collection of minerals that he and his wife, Clara, built up over decades. In 1964-65 Smale was a vocal supporter of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and an early opponent of the Vietnam War. With Jerry Rubin he organized the large anti-war protest in Berkeley in the spring of 1965.