Burton Rodin is an American mathematician known for his research in conformal mappings and Riemann surfaces. He is a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.
Education
Rodin received a Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles 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 University of California, San Diego from 1970 to 1994. He was chair of the Mathematics Department from 1977 to 1981, and became professor emeritus in June 1994.
[ See list of department chairs, and changes in personnel 1993-1994]
Research
Rodin's 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.
[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]
In 1980, Rodin and Stefan E. Warschawski solved the Visser–Ostrowski problem for derivatives of conformal mappings at the boundary.[B. Rodin and S. E. Warschawski, “On the derivative of the Riemann mapping function near a boundary point and the Visser-Ostrowski problem”, Mathematische Annalen, 248, (1980), 125–137.] In 1987 he proved the Thurston conjecture for circle packings, jointly with Dennis Sullivan.[B. Rodin and D. Sullivan, “The convergence of circle packings to the Riemann mapping”, Journal of Differential Geometry, 26 (1987), 349–360.]
Awards and honors
In 2012, Rodin was elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
[ List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-01-27.]
Selected books
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B. Rodin and L. Sario, Principal Functions, D. Van Nostrand Co., Princeton, N.J., 1968, 347 pages.
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B. Rodin, Calculus and Analytic Geometry, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1970, 800 pages.
External links
