Theodore Shifrin

I retired in May, 2015, and now reside in San Diego. I am a Josiah Meigs Teaching Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, having received the Meigs Award in 1997. I was the 2000 winner of the Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, Southeast section, presented by the Mathematical Association of America.  I received the Lothar Tresp Outstanding Honors Professor Award in 2002 and 2010, as well as the Honoratus Medal in 1992, and I received the Franklin College Outstanding Academic Advising Award for 2012.   My research interests were in differential geometry and complex algebraic geometry.

You can view the "text" of my talk at the MAA Southeastern Section meeting, March 30, 2001, entitled Tidbits of Geometry Through the Ages.

I was the Honors adviser for students majoring in Mathematics at The University of Georgia from 1983 to 2015. I have also been advising Honors freshmen and sophomores majoring in Physics, Physics & Astronomy. If you would like to see how the Honors Program at The University of Georgia garnered national attention a while ago, you might try the cover story of the September 16, 1996 issue of U.S. News & World Report, p. 109. (I have a personal stake in this, of course.)

I wrote a text for MATH 4250/6250, Differential Geometry: A First Course in Curves and Surfaces. The current version (revised August, 2024) is available in .pdf format, and, as usual, comments and suggestions are always welcome. They are also available at the AMS Open Notes website. If you're interested in using them as a class text, all I ask is that the students incur at most a copying fee. I am always happy to hear from people who have used the notes and have comments and suggestions to improve them. Those of you with access to Mathematica may be interested in a little Mathematica primer I wrote for my students a few years ago. As I can no longer upload it to this website, email me to request a copy.

Long ago, I wrote a senior-level mathematics text, Abstract Algebra: A Geometric Approach, published by Prentice Hall (now Pearson) in 1996. You might want to refer to the list of typos and emendations.  Please email me if you find other errors or have any comments or suggestions.

Malcolm Adams and I completed the second edition of our linear algebra text, Linear Algebra: A Geometric Approach, published by W.H. Freeman in 2011. Our approach puts greater emphasis on both geometry and proof techniques than most books currently available; somewhat novel is a discussion of the mathematics of computer graphics. Here is a list of errata and typos.

My textbook Multivariable Mathematics: Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calculus, and Manifolds was published by J. Wiley & Sons in 2004. The text integrates the linear algebra and calculus material, emphasizing the theme of implicit versus explicit. It includes proofs and all the theory of the calculus without giving short shrift to computations and physical applications. There is, as always, the obligatory list of errata and typos; please email me if you have any comments or have discovered any errors. Click here if you want a list of errata in the solutions manual.

With gracious thanks to Patty Wagner, Eric Lybrand, Cameron Bjorklund, Justin Payan, and Cameron Zahedi, my lectures in Multivariable Mathematics (MATH 3500(H)–MATH 3510(H)) are available, for better or for worse, on YouTube. The first semester covers the basics of linear algebra and differential calculus; the second semester covers integration, manifolds, differential forms and Stokes's Theorem, and eigenvalues.

For public reference, here is a list of errata in Guillemin and Pollack's Differential Topology.

My old departmental webpage can (for now) still be accessed here.