# Thomas Banchoff

Thomas Banchoff at Berkeley in 1973 (photo by George Bergman)

Thomas Francis Banchoff (born 1938) is an American mathematician specializing in geometry. He is a professor at Brown University, where he has taught since 1967. He is known for his research in differential geometry in three and four dimensions, for his efforts to develop methods of computer graphics in the early 1990s, and most recently for his pioneering work in methods of undergraduate education utilizing online resources.

Banchoff attended the University of Notre Dame and received his Ph.D from UC Berkeley in 1964, where he was a student of Shiing-Shen Chern.[1] Before going to Brown he taught at Harvard University and the University of Amsterdam. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[2] He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America.[3]

## Selected works

• with Stephen Lovett: Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces, A. K. Peters 2010
• with Terence Gaffney, Clint McCrory: Cusps of Gauss Mappings, Pitman 1982
• with John Wermer: Linear Algebra through Geometry, Springer Verlag 1983
• Beyond the third dimension: geometry, computer graphics, and higher dimensions, Scientific American Library, Freeman 1990
• Triple points and surgery of immersed surfaces. Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 46 (1974), 407–413. (concerning the number of triple points of immersed surfaces in ${\displaystyle R^{3}}$.)
• Critical points and curvature for embedded polyhedra. J. Differential Geometry 1 (1967), 245–256. (Theorem of Gauß-Bonnet for Polyhedra)