Dmitri Burago, professor of mathematics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive the title of distinguished professor of mathematics. Burago was honored with the title in recognition of his exceptional record of teaching, research and service to the University community. The honor is designated by the Office of the President of Penn State based on the recommendations of colleagues and the dean.
Burago describes his research as "mathematics with physics thinking." His two most recent publications, appearing in the Annals of Mathematics and the Duke Mathematical Journal, concern inverse problems and tomography, which is the imaging of any kind of penetrating wave, one thin section at a time -- a method used in geophysics, oceanography, materials science, astrophysics and other sciences. His specialties also include branches of mathematics and physics called dynamical systems, algorithmic complexity, Finsler geometry, combinatorial group theory, and partial differential equations.
In 1997, Burago was the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship and, in 1995, he received Penn State's Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievements. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Geometry and Topology, the Journal of Topology and Analysis, and the Electronic Research Announcements of the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and he has been a member of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical Society since 1992. He has helped to organize mathematical conferences across the United States and abroad, and he has been invited to deliver many lectures at scientific symposia across the world.
Burago has published numerous scientific papers throughout his career in various journals, including the Annals of Mathematics, Geometric and Functional Analysis, the Journal of Geometry and Topology, the Journal of Topology and Analysis. In 2001, he co-authored a textbook "A Course in Metric Geometry."
Before joining the Eberly College of Science faculty at Penn State in 1994, Burago was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, a researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation, and an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics at Saint Petersburg State University in Russia. He received doctoral and master's degrees from Saint Petersburg State University in 1992 and 1986, respectively.