Burton Rodin Explained

Burton Rodin
Alma Mater:	University of California, Los Angeles
Thesis Title:	Reproducing Formulas on Riemann Surfaces
Thesis Year:	1961
Doctoral Advisor:	Leo Sario
Known For:	Thurston conjecture for circle packings
Field:	Mathematics
Work Institution:	University of California, San Diego
Prizes:	Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2012)

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.^[1]

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.^[2]

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.^{[3] [4]}

In 1980, Rodin and Stefan E. Warschawski solved the Visser–Ostrowski problem for derivatives of conformal mappings at the boundary.^[5] In 1987 he proved the Thurston conjecture for circle packings, jointly with Dennis Sullivan.^[6]

Awards and honors

In 2012, Rodin was elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[7]

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.

Notes and References

1. Web site: Burton Rodin - The Mathematics Genealogy Project. www.genealogy.ams.org.
2. Web site: Department history. UCSD Mathematics Department. 2024-04-10. See list of department chairs, and changes in personnel 1993-1994
3. Web site: Website for systolic geometry and topology . www.cs.biu.ac.il.
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
5. 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.
6. B. Rodin and D. Sullivan, “The convergence of circle packings to the Riemann mapping”, Journal of Differential Geometry, 26 (1987), 349 - 360.
7. https://www.ams.org/profession/fellows-list List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society