Stephen Smale was awarded a BS from the University of Michigan in 1952 and an MS the following year. In 1960, Smale was appointed an associate professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, moving to a professorship at Columbia University the following year. He retired from Berkeley in 1995 and took up a post as professor at the City University of Hong Kong. He has done research in various areas of mathematics including computational mathematics. He is presently working in the structure of the genome, especially the dynamics of expression levels and its relation to cell differentiation.