Burt Totaro

Burt Totaro
Born	Burt James Totaro 1967 (age 56–57)
Alma mater	Princeton University University of California, Berkeley
Awards	Whitehead Prize (2000) Prix Franco-Britannique (2001)
Scientific career
Institutions	University of California, Los Angeles University of Cambridge University of Chicago
Thesis	K-Theory and Algebraic Cycles  (1989)
Doctoral advisor	Shoshichi Kobayashi
Website	burttotaro.wordpress.com www.math.ucla.edu/~totaro/

Burt James Totaro, FRS (b. 1967), is an American mathematician, currently a Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in algebraic geometry and algebraic topology.

Education and early life

Totaro participated in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth while in grade school. After spending two years at Moorestown High School in New Jersey, he enrolled at Princeton University at the age of thirteen, becoming the youngest freshman in its history. He scored a perfect 800 on the math portion and a 690 on the verbal portion of the SAT-I exam at the age of 12. He graduated in 1984 and went on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in 1989.

Career and research

Since 2009, he has been one of three managing editors of the journal Compositio Mathematica; he is also on the editorial boards of Forum of Mathematics, Pi and Sigma, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. In 2012, he became a Professor in the UCLA Department of Mathematics.

Totaro's work is influenced by the Hodge conjecture, and is based on the connections and application of topology to algebraic geometry. His work has applications in a number of diverse areas of mathematics, from representation theory to Lie theory and group cohomology.

Selected works

• Totaro, Burt (1996). "Configuration spaces of algebraic varieties". Topology. 35 (4): 1057–1067. doi:10.1016/0040-9383(95)00058-5. MR 1404924.
• Totaro, Burt (2014). Group Cohomology and Algebraic Cycles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-01577-7.

Recognition

In 2000, he was elected Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at the University of Cambridge. In the same year, he was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the London Mathematical Society.

In 2009, Totaro was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. He was included in the 2019 class of fellows of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to algebraic geometry, Lie theory and cohomology and their connections and for service to the profession".