Burton Rodin

Burt Rodin (born Burton Rodin, 1933, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American mathematician known for his research in conformal mapping and Riemann surfaces. He was a professor at the University of California, San Diego 1970–1994 where he was Chair of the Mathematics Department 1977–1981. He became Professor Emeritus in June 1994.

He received a Ph. D. at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1961. His thesis, titled “Reproducing kernels and principal functions”, was written under the supervision of Leo Sario.

Mathematical contributions

In 1980 he solved the Visser-Ostrowski problem for derivatives of conformal mappings at the boundary, jointly with Stefan E. Warschawski.[1] In 1987 he proved the Thurston conjecture for circle packings, jointly with Dennis Sullivan.[2] His 1968 work on extremal length of Riemann surfaces, together with an observation of Mikhail Katz, yielded the first systolic geometry inequality for surfaces independent of their genus.[3][4]

References

  1. ^ B. Rodin and S. E. Warschawski, “On the derivative of the Riemann mapping function near a boundary point and the Visser-Ostroswki problem”, Mathematische Annalen, 248, (1980), 125–137.
  2. ^ B. Rodin and D. Sullivan, “The convergence of circle packings to the Riemann mapping”, Journal of Differential Geometry, 26 (1987), 349–360.
  3. ^ Website for systolic geometry, http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~katzmik/sgtdirectory/rodin.html
  4. ^ The method of extremal length: invited hour address presented at the 705th meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 80, 1974, 587–606

Selected books