Christopher Francis Freiling is a mathematician responsible for Freiling's axiom of symmetry in set theory. He has also made significant contributions to coding theory, in the process establishing connections between that field and matroid theory.
Freiling obtained his Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of California, Los Angeles under the supervision of Donald A. Martin. He is a member of the faculty of the Department of Mathematics at California State University, San Bernardino.
Dougherty, Freiling, and Zeger (2005) showed via an ingenious counterexample that unlike the multicast case, linear network coding fails to achieve the capacity region of a general graphical multimessage network error-free. This counterexample hinges on a deep connection between linear network coding and matroid theory.