Michael Hartley Freedman (born April 21, 1951) is an American mathematician at Microsoft Station Q, a research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

His father, Benedict Freedman, was an American Jewish aeronautical engineer, musician, writer, and mathematician.

[5] In the same year he wrote a letter to Ralph Fox, a Princeton University professor at the time, and was admitted to the university's graduate school, where in 1968 he continued his studies and received a Ph.D. in 1973 for his doctoral dissertation titled Codimension-Two Surgery, written under the supervision of William Browder.

In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego.

[8] He currently works at Microsoft Station Q at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his team is involved in the development of the topological quantum computer.