"He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology. In 1982, he was awarded the Fields Medal for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds." \\ Terence Tao's obit: "Thurston provided one of the strongest pieces of evidence towards the truth of the Poincaré conjecture, until the work of Grisha Perelman in 2002-2003 proved both the Poincaré conjecture and the geometrisation conjecture by developing Hamilton’s Ricci flow methods. There are now several variants of Perelman’s proof of both conjectures; in the proof of geometrisation by Bessieres, Besson, Boileau, Maillot, and Porti, Thurston’s hyperbolisation theorem is a crucial ingredient, allowing one to bypass the need for the theory of Alexandrov spaces in a key step in Perelman’s argument." http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2012... - Adriano

"The inner force that drives mathematicians isn’t to look for applications; it is to understand the structure and inner beauty of mathematics." --Thurston, from NYT obit http://www.nytimes.com/2012... \\ See his recent lecture, Mystery of 3-Manifolds (2010, Paris) http://youtu.be/4jdmkUQDWtQ [59-min, Smale in the first row :-] - Adriano