Richard Schwartz, Mathematics

Gretchen and Barry Mazur Chair

Richard Evan Schwartz, a mathematics professor at Brown University, explores geometry and dynamics, drawing in particular on computational experimentation, while investigating fascinating mathematical problems arising from paper geometry and origami.

Richard Evan Schwartz is the Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University.  He is generally interested in geometry and dynamics. He is especially interested in simply stated problems that are amenable to computer experimentation.   He likes to build graphical user interfaces which explore these kinds of problems.

Schwartz received his undergraduate degree from UCLA in 1987 and then his PhD from Princeton University in 1991, under the supervision of William Thurston.  After postoctoral positions at CUNY, IHES, MSRI, and UC San Diego, he became an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland in 1996 and then a Professor there in 2000. He joined the faculty at Brown University in 2005 and has been the Chancellor’s Professor there since 2010.   He was a speaker at the International
Congress of Mathematicians in 2002 and in 2022.

Lately, Schwartz has been working on optimization problems in paper geometry.  For instance, he proved that a rectangular strip of paper can be isometrically folded in space into a Moebius band if and only if its aspect ratio is greater than the square root of three. He also proved that the minimum number of vertices needed to make an intrinsically flat torus out of origami is 8.

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