Burr received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1969 from Princeton University under the supervision of Bernard Dwork. His thesis research involved the Waring–Goldbach problem in number theory, which concerns the representations of integers as sums of powers of prime numbers.
He is a retired professor of Computer Science at The City College of New New York Many of his subsequent publications involve problems from the field of Ramsey theory. He has published 27 papers with Paul Erdőson
The Erdős–Burr conjecture, published as a conjecture by Erdős and Burr in 1975 and still unsolved, states that sparse graphs have linearly growing Ramsey numbers.
H. J. C. H.
