Rate My Professor Arthur Baragar

Arthur Baragar is a Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), specializing in Mathematics. He received his B.Sc. from the University of Alberta and his Ph.D. in 1991 from Brown University under the supervision of Joseph Hillel Silverman. Baragar has been on the faculty at UNLV since approximately 1998, serving as a professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences. In 2014-2015, he was selected as a Leadership Fellow at UNLV. He has chaired search committees for faculty positions in Mathematical Sciences and mentored students, including advising Ph.D. student Daniel Lautzenheiser, who completed his degree at UNLV in 2019. Baragar has also coached the UNLV Putnam Competition team and delivered opening remarks at the A-Star Winter Math Camp held on the UNLV campus.

Baragar is a number theorist with research interests in arithmetic and algebraic geometry, particularly the study of K3 surfaces, including their Picard groups, groups of automorphisms, ample cones, counting rational points or curves with bounded height in orbits, and vector heights and canonical vector heights. These problems connect to counting integer points with bounded height on hyperbolic hypersurfaces, counting lattice points in hyperbolic geometries, and the study of multi-branch linear trees and their Hausdorff dimensions. He maintains interests in classical problems in geometry involving constructions with traditional tools. Baragar authored the textbook A Survey of Classical and Modern Geometries: With Computer Activities (Prentice Hall, 2001), with an updated version available through AMS Open Math Notes (revised 2020). His key publications include "The Ample Cone for a K3 Surface" (Canadian Journal of Mathematics), "On the Unicity Conjecture for Markoff Numbers" (Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, 2018), "A game of packings" with Daniel Lautzenheiser (arXiv, 2020), and "Efficiently Constructing Tangent Circles" (Mathematics Magazine, 2020).