#department_head #### Years Active at UW 1969-2005 2005 - Amertius #### Department Head 1985-1986 #### Academic History PhD - Dartmouth College 1969 Dissertation: Finitely Generated Ideals of Differentiable Functions #### Industry History #### Research Interests Rigidity Theory and Math Education **Professor Ben Roth**'s research deals with characterization of rigidity or flexibility of frames in Euclidean spaces, and approximation theory. A frame in **Rn** is said to be flexible if it can be continuously deformed in **Rn** and is said to be rigid if it is not flexible. For example, a square with rigid incompressible edges in **R2** is flexible, since it may be continuously deformed into a family rhombi in **R2** . A triangle is rigid in **R2** since it cannot be deformed without leaving **R2** however, a triangle is flexible in **R3** , since it can rotate along an edge. This leads to the main question: Is a given frame rigid or flexible in a given Euclidean spaces **Rn**? This fundamental area of research uses methods of algebraic geometry, differential topology, complex analysis, projective geometry, linear algebra, graph theory and combinatorial geometry. #### Department Contributions #### Picture ![[BenGeorgeRoth.png]]