Overview
Buma Fridman is a Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Physics. After obtaining his PhD in Mathematics at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, Leningrad, USSR in 1973, he started his research and teaching career in Khabarovsk Pedagogical Institute, Khabarovsk, USSR. In 1981, he emigrated to the USA. After working for one year at the university of Michigan, he joined the Math Department of Wichita State University in 1982. He was promoted to Full Professor in 1988. For the period of 28 years (1987-2015) he served as the Department Chairman.
Buma Fridman's research areas include Real and Complex Analysis. Early on, his research focused on problems related to the 13th problem of D. Hilbert. Later, he became interested in areas of Several Complex Variables. Namely: biholomorphic classification of complex manifolds, boundary behavior of analytic maps, holomorphic automorphism groups of hyperbolic manifolds, fixed point theorems. Some of his research became well known and got significant following. His first article, while an undergraduate at Moscow State University (“An improvement in the smoothness of the functions in A. N. Kolmogorov's theorem on superpositions”, Dokl. Akad. Nauk SSSR, 177:5 (1967), 1019–1022) is still being used by current researchers (some in the applied area of neural networks). His article written while the WSU professor (``Biholomorphic Invariants of a Hyperbolic Manifold and some Applications'', Transactions of the American Math Society, Vol. 276, No. 2, pp. 685-698, (1983)) got serious attention lately and the notion he introduced there is now referred to as the Fridman Invariant.