Edward Burger

Edward Bruce Burger (born December 10, 1964) is a mathematician and President Emeritus of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Previously, he was the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics at Williams College, and the Robert Foster Cherry Professor for Great Teaching at Baylor University. He also had been named to a single-year-appointment as vice provost of strategic educational initiatives at Baylor University in February 2011. He currently serves as the president and CEO of St. David's Foundation.

Burger has been honored as a leader in education and for his innovative work in developing educational and entertaining mathematics electronic textbooks. He has been a keynote speaker, invited special session speaker, or the conference chair at a number of American Mathematical Society, Mathematical Association of America, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conferences.

During the late 1980s Burger was featured at a stand-up comedy club in Austin, Texas and also was an 'independent contractor', writing for Jay Leno. Today he has a weekly program on higher education, thinking, and learning produced by NPR's Austin affiliate KUT called Higher ED.

Contents

 * 1Education
 * 2Career
 * 2.1Research
 * 2.2Teaching
 * 2.3Publications
 * 2.4Professional positions
 * 3Selected honors and awards
 * 4References
 * 5External links

Education[edit]
Graduated from Connecticut College in 1985, where he had earned B.A. summa cum laude with distinction in mathematics, in 1990, he was awarded his Ph.D. in mathematics from The University of Texas at Austin. He did his postdoctoral work at the University of Waterloo in Canada. In 2013 he was awarded an LL.D. from Williams College.

Research[edit]
His research interests include algebraic number theory, Diophantine analysis, p-adic analysis, geometry of numbers, and the theory of continued fractions. He teaches abstract algebra, "The Art of Creating Mathematics", and Diophantine analysis.

Teaching[edit]
He has taught or has been a visiting scholar at The University of Texas at Austin, Westminster College, James Madison University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Concordia University Texas, Baylor University, and the Macquarie University in Australia.

Burger is a pioneer in rich, multimedia Internet lectures that, together with written material, form an electronic textbook. Together with Thinkwell, Burger "crafted the first-ever virtual, CD-ROM video, interactive, mathematics texts/courses" published over the World Wide Web. Additionally, his lesson tutorial videos earned publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston one of the 2007 Awards of Excellence from Technology & Learning, an academic publication.

Burger has written and starred in number of educational videos, including the 24-lecture video series Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers and An Introduction to Number Theory. He has delivered more than 400 lectures worldwide and has appeared on more than 40 radio and TV programs including ABC News Now on WABC-TV in New York and National Public Radio. He starred in the "Mathletes" episode of NBC's "Science of the Winter Olympics" series shown on the Today Show and throughout the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

In recognition for his work in multimedia education technology, The Association of Educational Publishers awarded Burger with the 2007 Distinguished Achievement Award for Educational Video Technology

Burger feels that "math trauma" is commonly inflicted upon America's elementary and middle-school students, particularly girls, having received a seventh-grade report card stating: "Eddie is a nice boy, but he'll never do well in arithmetic." He offers his students "challenging questions for which the solution is by no means apparent". For example, when teaching students about topology, he asked students if it is "possible to take a cord of rope 6 feet (1.8 m) long and tie it snugly around your right ankle and your left ankle, take off your pants, turn them inside out, and put your pants back on without ever cutting the rope?" He proceeded to demonstrate the solution to that challenge, wearing huge Boston Red Sox boxer shorts under his trousers, at the Boston Public Library in the summer of 2005.

In addition to his math courses, Burger teaches a short course in comedy writing during the winter study program at Williams. Combining math with comedy comes from his days as a stand-up comic at the Laff Stop Comedy Club in Austin in the late-1980s.

Publications[edit]
Burger has written 12 books and has had more than 30 papers published in scholarly journals. With Michael Starbird, he coauthored The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking, for which they won a 2001 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award, and Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz,, a humorous look at mathematics filed under both math and humor in the Library of Congress catalog. Burger is also an