William Goldman (born August 12, 1931) is an American novelist, playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. He lives in New York City.

William Goldman (born 1955) is a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park (since 1986). He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980. He was on the Board of Governors for the The Geometry Center at the University of Minnesota from 1994-1996. He is married and has three children.

Goldman has investigated geometric structures, in various incarnations, on manifolds since his undergraduate thesis at Princeton University, "Affine manifolds and projective geometry on manifolds" (supervised by William Thurston and Dennis Sullivan).

With John Parker, he examined the complex hyperbolic ideal triangle group representations. These are representations of hyperbolic ideal triangle groups to the group of holomorphic isometries of the complex hyperbolic plane such that each standard generator of the triangle group maps to a C-reflection and the products of pairs of generators to parabolics. The space of representations for a given triangle group (modulo conjugacy) is parametrized by a half-open interval. They showed that the representations in a particular range were discrete and conjectured that a representation would be discrete if and only if it was in a specified larger range. This has become known as the Goldman-Parker conjecture and was eventually proven by Richard Schwartz.