Welcome to my Home Page!

Hello, my name is David Bao. I am Professor in the Department of Mathematics. 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 in 1985 I headed straight for Houston, Texas! In 2007, I decided to get a taste of what it is like to be an adminstrator at San Francisco State University. As of 2018 Spring, I have returned to my regular job in research and teaching.

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.

My office is located at 912 Thornton Hall.

Mail can be addressed to me at:

This page was last updated 10 April, 2018.