Burton Rodin is an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

known for his research in

conformal mapping In mathematics, a conformal map is a function that locally preserves angles, but not necessarily lengths. More formally, let U and V be open subsets of \mathbb^n. A function f:U\to V is called conformal (or angle-preserving) at a point u_0\in ...

s and

Riemann surfaces In mathematics, particularly in complex analysis, a Riemann surface is a connected one-dimensional complex manifold. These surfaces were first studied by and are named after Bernhard Riemann. Riemann surfaces can be thought of as deformed versio ...

. He is a professor emeritus at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

Education

Rodin received a Ph.D. at the

University of California, Los Angeles The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

in 1961. His thesis, titled ''Reproducing Formulas on Riemann Surfaces'', was written under the supervision of Leo Sario.

Career

He was a professor at the

from 1970 to 1994. He was chair of the Mathematics Department from 1977 to 1981, and became professor emeritus in June 1994.

Research

Rodin's 1968 work on extremal length of Riemann surfaces, together with an observation of

Mikhail Katz Mikhail "Mischa" Gershevich Katz (born 1958, in Chișinău)Curriculum vitae
...

, yielded the first

systolic geometry In mathematics, systolic geometry is the study of systolic invariants of manifolds and polyhedra, as initially conceived by Charles Loewner and developed by Mikhail Gromov, Michael Freedman, Peter Sarnak, Mikhail Katz, Larry Guth, and others, ...

inequality for surfaces independent of their genus. In 1980, Rodin and

Stefan E. Warschawski Stefan Emanuel "Steve" Warschawski (April 18, 1904 – May 5, 1989) was a Russian-born American mathematician, a professor and department chair at the University of Minnesota and the founder of the mathematics department at the University of Califo ...

solved the Visser–Ostrowski problem for derivatives of conformal mappings at the boundary. In 1987 he proved the Thurston conjecture for circle packings, jointly with

Dennis Sullivan Dennis Parnell Sullivan (born February 12, 1941) is an American mathematician known for his work in algebraic topology, geometric topology, and dynamical systems. He holds the Albert Einstein Chair at the City University of New York Graduate Ce ...

Awards and honors

In 2012, Rodin was elected fellow of the

American Mathematical Society The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...

.List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society
retrieved 2013-01-27.

Selected books

* B. Rodin and L. Sario, ''Principal Functions'', D. Van Nostrand Co., Princeton, N.J., 1968, 347 pages. * B. Rodin, ''Calculus and Analytic Geometry'', Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970, 800 pages.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Rodin, Burton 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians Mathematicians from Missouri 1933 births Living people Fellows of the American Mathematical Society University of California, Los Angeles alumni University of California, San Diego faculty