Freedman was born in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. His father, Benedict Freedman, was an American Jewish aeronautical engineer, musician, writer, and mathematician.[2][3] His mother, Nancy Mars Freedman, performed as an actress and also trained as an artist.[4] His parents cowrote a series of novels together.[3] He entered the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out after two semesters.[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. After graduating, Freedman returned to Berkeley, where he was a lecturer in the department of mathematics until 1975. He left Berkeley to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. In 1976 he was appointed assistant professor in the department of mathematics at the University of California, San Diego. He spent the year 1980/81 at IAS, then returned to UCSD, where in 1982 he was promoted to professor. He was appointed the Charles Lee Powell chair of mathematics at UCSD in 1985.
Michael H. Freedman and Frank Quinn, Topology of 4-manifolds, Princeton Mathematical Series, vol 39, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1990. ISBN0-691-08577-3
^Freedman, M. H. (1984). "The disk theorem for four-dimensional manifolds". In Z. Ciesielski; C. Olech (eds.). Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (August 16–24, 1983, Warsaw). Vol. 1. PWN (Warsaw). pp. 647––663. MR0804721.