Brooks was born in 1952 in
Washington, D.C. and grew up in
Bethesda, Maryland, where he graduated in 1970 from
Walt Whitman High School. In 1974 he completed his Masters thesis from
Harvard University; his thesis "
Russell,
Poincaré, and the foundations of geometry" won him the
Bowdoin Prize for Essays in the Natural Sciences in 1975. He received his
Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1977; his thesis,
The smooth cohomology of groups of diffeomorphisms, was written under the supervision of
Raoul Bott. He then undertook
postdoctoral studies with J. Peter Matelski at the
State University of New York at Stony Brook, where they created pictures of fractals, leading to
Benoit Mandelbrot's creation of the
Mandelbrot set in 1980. Brooks died from
heart attack during a visit to
Montreal, Canada and was buried in Sde Yehoshua cemetery in Haifa. He was survived by his parents David and Harriet Brooks, his wife Sharon and four children. His eldest son
Shimon Brooks is a mathematics professor at
Bar-Ilan University. ==Work==