William Browder (January 6, 1934 – February 2025) was an American mathematician, who specialized in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry.

Browder was one of the pioneers with Sergei Novikov, Dennis Sullivan and C. T. C. Wall of the surgery theory method for classifying high-dimensional manifolds.

William Browder was born in New York City on January 6, 1934,[1][2] the son of Raisa (née Berkmann), a Jewish Russian woman from Saint Petersburg, and American Communist Party leader Earl Browder, from Wichita, Kansas.

His father had moved to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he met and married Raisa.

degree in 1954 and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, with a dissertation entitled Homology of Loop Spaces, advised by John Coleman Moore.