Rate My Professor Burt Totaro

Burt James Totaro is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in algebraic geometry, topology, and Lie groups. Recognized as a mathematical prodigy, he enrolled at Princeton University at the age of 13 and graduated in 1984. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, with a dissertation entitled "K-Theory and Algebraic Cycles" supervised by Shoshichi Kobayashi. Totaro's academic career includes faculty positions at the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge, where he held the Lowndean Professorship of Astronomy and Geometry. He has been a professor at UCLA since returning from Cambridge. In addition to his research, Totaro contributes to the mathematical community as managing editor of Compositio Mathematica since 2009 and as a member of the editorial boards for Forum of Mathematics Pi and Sigma, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, and the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

Totaro's research focuses on the profound interplay between algebraic geometry and algebraic topology, particularly through the lens of the Hodge conjecture, algebraic cycles, group cohomology, and applications to Lie theory and representation theory. His groundbreaking work has encouraged algebraic geometers to employ advanced topological tools, resolving key problems and making tangible progress on major conjectures. Prominent publications include his book "Group Cohomology and Algebraic Cycles" (Cambridge University Press, 2014); "Hypersurfaces that are not stably rational" (Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 2016); "Chow groups, Chow cohomology, and linear varieties" (Forum of Mathematics, Sigma, 2014); "Torsion algebraic cycles and complex cobordism" (Journal of the American Mathematical Society, 1997); "Configuration spaces of algebraic varieties" (Topology, 1996); and "The resolution property for schemes and stacks" (Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik, 2004). Totaro's achievements have been honored with the Whitehead Prize from the London Mathematical Society (2000), the Prix Franco-Britannique (2001), election as a Fellow of the Royal Society (2009), and designation as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2019).