Stephen Smale was born on July 15, 1930 in Flint, Michigan. He entered the University of Michigan at age 18 and achieved straight A’s in his freshman year. After that, his grades dropped like a stone and he barely qualified for graduate studies in the University of Michigan’s mathematics department. A disappointing performance in his Ph.D. studies prompted the department chair, to warn Stephen that he would be dropped from the program if he didn’t pull up his mathematical socks. This was enough to motivate him to dive more deeply into his research and in 1957, he was awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics.
In 1958, Smale was hired by the University of Chicago as an instructor in the mathematics department. In that year, he astounded the mathematical world with a proof of a sphere eversion. That is, proved that it is mathematically possible to turn a sphere inside-out without introducing a sharp crease at any point. He escalated his achievements to an even higher level in 1961 with his proof of the Poincaré conjecture for all dimensions greater than or equal to 5, and then generalized these ideas the following year by establishing the h-cobordism theorem. This was just the beginning of many subsequent contributions to a variety of different branches of mathematics.
In 1996 was awarded a Fields medal, considered to be the mathematical equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Stephen Smale’s story reminds us that students who achieve poor grades may have untapped potential that merely needs some gentle encouragement or tough love to kick start the process.
