Edward Burger


Edward Bruce Burger 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.

Education

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.

Career

Research

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

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 , 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 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 ' and '. 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 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 in Austin in the late-1980s.

Publications

Burger has written 12 books and has had more than 30 papers published in scholarly journals. With Michael Starbird, he coauthored , 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 associate editor for the American Mathematical Monthly and a member of the editorial board for .
Some of the books and papers he has authored or co-authored include:
Additionally, Burger has created virtual video textbooks on CD-ROM and on the web for on the topics of "College Algebra", 2000; "Pre-Calculus", 2000; "Calculus", 2001; "Intermediate Algebra", 2001; "Beginning Algebra", 2004; "Trigonometry", 2006; "Prealgebra", 2007; and "Algebra II", 2011.

Professional positions

Burger has held the following professional positions:
; University of Texas at Austin
; University of Waterloo, Canada
; Williams College
; James Madison University
; University of Colorado at Boulder
; Macquarie University, Australia
; Westminster College
;
; Texas Christian University
; American Mathematical Monthly
;
;
; NUMB3RS in the Classroom Project, CBS-TV/Paramount Studios/Texas Instruments
;The Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts
;Baylor University
;Southwestern University
;St. David's Foundation

Selected honors and awards

Some of the honors and awards Burger has received include:
Burger is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Mathematics and was the Lissack Professor for Social Responsibility and Personal Ethics and the Gaudino Scholar at Williams College, where he was also awarded the 2007 Nelson Bushnell Prize for Scholarship and Teaching.
Burger has been honored by The Mathematical Association of America on several occasions: 2001, Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics; 2001–2003, George Pólya Lecturer; 2004, Chauvenet Prize; and 2006, Lester R. Ford Award