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Robert W. Brooks

Robert W. Brooks was an American mathematician who worked in spectral geometry, Riemann surfaces, circle packings and differential geometry.

1952 to 2002Spectral geometryBounded cohomology theoremEarly fractal pictures with Matelski

Born: 16 September 1952, Washington, D.C.
Died: 5 September 2002, Montreal
Occupation: mathematician
Education: Harvard University, Walt Whitman High School

Robert W. Brooks was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C.

Brooks was born in 1952 in Washington, D.C. He grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and finished Walt Whitman High School there in 1970.

He wrote his master's thesis at Harvard University in 1974, on Russell, Poincaré and the foundations of geometry. It won him the Bowdoin Prize in 1975. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1977 under Raoul Bott.

As a postdoctoral researcher at Stony Brook, he and J. Peter Matelski made pictures of fractals that led to Benoit Mandelbrot's creation of the Mandelbrot set in 1980. In a 1981 paper he proved that the bounded cohomology of a topological space is isomorphic to that of its fundamental group.

He taught at the University of Maryland from 1979 to 1984, then at the University of Southern California. From 1995 he worked at the Technion in Haifa.

Brooks died of a heart attack in 2002 during a visit to Montreal. He was buried in the Sde Yehoshua cemetery in Haifa. He left his wife Sharon and 4 children.