Richard Burroughs Mather (November 11, 1913 – November 28, 2014) was an American Sinologist who was a professor of Chinese at the University of Minnesota for 35 years.

Richard Burroughs Mather was born in 1913 in Baoding, China, where his parents were serving as Protestant missionaries. He lived in China for his entire youth before coming to the United States in the early 1930s in order to attend Princeton University, where he graduated with a B.A. summa cum laude in 1935. Even though he intended to return to China after his graduation, he was unable to do so due to the chaos of World War II. Instead, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese literature in 1949 with a dissertation entitled, "The Doctrine of Non-Duality in the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra."

Once he received his Ph.D. in 1949, Richard B. Mather was hired as a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he founded the Chinese program and developed its courses. Professor Mather taught full-time at the University of Minnesota until he was forced to retire in 1984 because of a university policy that required professors to retire at age 70. However, because of his specialized wealth of knowledge in classical Chinese, especially in the Chinese Six Dynasties period (220-589), he was allowed to teach part-time for several years after that and do directed studies for advanced students in Chinese.

After he completely retired from university teaching In the late 1990s, Professor Mather and another retired Chinese Professor at the University of Minnesota, Chun-jo Liu, teamed up to form a private Chinese reading and translating group. The group was composed of Chinese professors and other highly educated individuals who had an advanced knowledge of Chinese, especially classical Chinese. The group would generally meet once or twice a week to read Chinese literature and poetry and then translate it into English. The group also participated in Chinese language conferences at which their panel members would read papers on their particular areas of interest and research.

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