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. In 2012 he was elected fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
He 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.

Mathematical contributions

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.

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

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.