Professor Ben Roth

Ph.D., Dartmouth, 1969

OFFICE: Ross Hall 317
PHONE: 307-766-5359
EMAIL:broth@uwyo.edu

Professor Ben Roth's research deals with characterization of rigidity or flexibility of frames in Euclidean spaces, and approximation theory. A frame in Rn is said to be flexible if it can be continuously deformed in Rn and is said to be rigid if it is not flexible. For example, a square with rigid incompressible edges in R2 is flexible, since it may be continuously deformed into a family rhombi in R2 . A triangle is rigid in R2 since it cannot be deformed without leaving R2 however, a triangle is flexible in R3 , since it can rotate along an edge. This leads to the main question: Is a given frame rigid or flexible in a given Euclidean spaces Rn? This fundamental area of research uses methods of algebraic geometry, differential topology, complex analysis, projective geometry, linear algebra, graph theory and combinatorial geometry.