Welcome to my Home Page!

Hello, my name is David Bao. I am Professor of Mathematics and of the Honors College. My research work primarily concerns Finsler Geometry. Loosely speaking, this is differential geometry done on Banach manifolds instead of Hilbert manifolds.

The person who initiated me into such an area of differential geometry was the late Professor S.S. Chern jpg; click here jpg for a photograph taken with him at the 2004 International Symposium on Finsler Geometry, held in the Nankai Institute of Mathematics, Tianjin, China.

I became interested in mathematics at the University of Notre Dame, got my Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley, and then apprenticed at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. (More in CV.) After all that studying, I thought it was high time to have some fun and to enjoy the good life. So I headed straight for Houston, Texas!

At the University of Houston, I teach calculus, calculus, and more calculus. I am slowly but surely beginning to understand that subject. This semester, I am teaching Math 1450 (Accelerated Calculus) as well as Math 3338 (Probability).

If you are interested in some material for Math 3363, a course (about PDEs) that I last taught in Spring 2005, please have a look at Math3363notes.pdf. There are also 18 companion Maple worksheets PDE-Mapleworksheets; but please make sure you have Maple9 or Maple10 installed BEFORE you attempt to download these files. If your interest is an eventual career in the financial (actuarial, investment, ...) sector, please examine MathFinance.pdf; this program is currently making its way up the administrative ladder of approval.

There is a book An Introduction to Riemann-Finsler Geometry BCSbookcover.pdf that I co-authored with Prof. Chern (Berkeley and Nankai) and Prof. Shen (IUPUI). (See a photo jpg of the authors, taken by the late Mrs. Chern.) It is volume 200 (published in 2000) of the Springer-Verlag GTM Series. Please inform me of mistakes that you find. Errors and corrections will be posted as soon as they are brought to my attention. Please click on BCS-Errata to download the appropriate file for the Errata.

In 2004, I co-edited a book entitled A Sampler of Riemann-Finsler Geometry BBCSbookcover.pdf, with Professors Bryant, Chern, and Shen. It is volume 50 of the Cambridge University Press MSRI Series. In this volume there is an expository article about the curvature of Finsler manifolds, with special emphasis on Einstein metrics, written jointly by myself and Dr. Colleen Robles. See jpg for a photograph (with Dr. Robles and Prof. Bourguignon) taken during the 2002 Workshop on Finsler Geometry, held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, California.

Other research publications and preprints are listed in my vita CV. If there is an article you would like to have, please email me. Two recent works are the following. The first is a short conference proceedings Unicorn.pdf in which I pursue a perturbative approach to the search for unicorns in Finsler geometry. The second is a long expository paper Curvatures_13Mar07.pdf in which I discuss two main problems based on the two curvatures of Finsler metrics. In the latter, I also propose a notion of Ricci flow for Finsler metrics.

My office is located at 632 PGH.
Office hours: TuTh 16:30--18:00.

Mail can be addressed to me at:

To visit some of my colleaques: Math Dept's Home Page

Here are some non-academic sides of me. I am quite fond of certain musical instruments. Do look in your attic. If you spot some junky-looking old fiddle with a faded Guarneri 2pcGjpg 1pcGjpg or Stradivari 2pcSjpg 1&2pcSbkjpg (the Marsick 1705 on the left, the Fontana 1702 on the right; from the website www.oistrakh.com of Michel Durand Mabire) 1&2pcSfrjpg label inside, call Bao immediately.

In case Finsler geometry is not your cup of tea, perhaps

• some mighty Lionheads and Ranchus Goldfish (goldfish photos are downloaded from www.goldfishconnection.com), or
• some 4-striped Clown loaches Clowns

would suit your fancy ? Has anyone ever seen a 5-striped one ?