Robert W. Brooks

Robert Wolfe Brooks (September 16, 1952 – September 5, 2002) was an American mathematician known for his work in spectral geometry, Riemann surfaces, circle packings, and differential geometry.

Biography Brooks was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, where he graduated in 1970 from Walt Whitman High School. In 1974 he completed his Masters thesis from Harvard University; his thesis "Russell, Poincaré, and the foundations of geometry" won him the Bowdoin Prize for Essays in the Natural Sciences in 1975.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977; his thesis, The smooth cohomology of groups of diffeomorphisms, was written under the supervision of Raoul Bott. He then undertook postdoctoral studies with J. Peter Matelski at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where they created pictures of fractals, leading to Benoit Mandelbrot's creation of the Mandelbrot set in 1980.

Brooks died from heart attack during a visit to Montreal, Canada and was buried in Sde Yehoshua cemetery in Haifa. He was survived by his parents David and Harriet Brooks, his wife Sharon and four children.

Honors Bowdoin Prize for Essays in the Natural Sciences, 1975 Alfred P. Sloan fellowship Guastella fellowship

Selected publications

Reviewer Maung Min-Oo for MathSciNet wrote: "This is a well written survey article on the construction of isospectral manifolds which are not isometric with emphasis on hyperbolic Riemann surfaces of constant negative curvature." Brooks, Robert, "Form in Topology", The Magicians of Form, ed. by Robert M. Weiss. Laurelhurst Publications, 2003.