Herbert Edelsbrunner

Herbert Edelsbrunner (b. 1958) is a computer scientist working in the field of computational geometry, the Arts & Science Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University, and the co-founder of Geomagic, Inc. He is the only computer scientist to have won the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award.

Academic biography

Edelsbrunner was born in 1958 in Graz, Austria. [http://www.welfenlab.de/events/hcw07/program/who_is_who/index.php Who is Who – Cyberworlds 2007] .] He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Graz University of Technology, under the supervision of Hermann Maurer; his thesis was entitled “Intersection Problems in Computational Geometry.” [mathgenealogy|name=Herbert Edelsbrunner|id=41369.] After a brief assistant professorship at Graz, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, and moved to Duke University in 1999. [ [http://www.cs.duke.edu/~edels/ Biographical information from Edelsbrunner's web page at Duke] .] In 1996, with his wife Ping Fu (then director of visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications), he co-founded Geomagic, a company that develops shape modeling software; he continues to serve on its board of directors. [ [http://www.geomagic.com/en/about_us/directors.php Geomagic board of directers] .]

In 1991, Edelsbrunner received the Alan T. Waterman Award. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and received an honorary doctorate from Graz University of Technology in 2006.

Publications

Edelsbrunner has over 100 research publications [ [http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/e/Edelsbrunner:Herbert.html DBLP: Herbert Edelsbrunner] .] and is an ISI highly cited researcher. [ [http://hcr3.isiknowledge.com/author.cgi?&link1=Results&id=1236 ISI highly cited researcher: Herbert Edelsbrunner] .]

He has also published two books on computational geometry: "Algorithms in Combinatorial Geometry" (Springer-Verlag, 1987, ISBN 9783540137221), and "Geometry and Topology for Mesh Generation" (Cambridge University Press, 2001, ISBN 9780521793094).

As Edelsbrunner's Waterman Award citation states, [ [http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=356892&tstart=1815 Abstracts of NSF Awards (STIS), Computer Research: Alan T. Waterman Award] .]

Research contributions

Edelsbrunner's most heavily cited research contribution [According to Google scholar, August 2008.] is his work with Ernst Mücke on "alpha shapes", a technique for defining a sequence of multiscale approximations to the shape of a three-dimensional point cloud. In this technique, one varies a parameter alpha ranging from 0 to the diameter of the point cloud; for each value of the parameter, the shape is approximated as the union of line segments, triangles, and tetrahedra defined by 2, 3, or 4 of the points respectively such that there exists a sphere of radius at most alpha containing only the defining points.

Another heavily cited paper, also with Mücke, concerns “simulation of simplicity.” This is a technique for automatically converting algorithms that work only when their inputs are in general position (for instance, algorithms that may misbehave when some three input points are collinear) into algorithms that work robustly, correctly, and efficiently in the face of special-position inputs.

Edelsbrunner has also made important contributions to algorithms for intersections of line segments, construction of K-sets, the ham sandwich theorem, Delaunay triangulation, point location, interval trees, fractional cascading, and protein docking. [citation|title=‘Computer-chemistry’ Yields New Insight Into A Puzzle Of Cell Division|journal=Science Daily|url=http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/12/051208231229.htm|date=December 9, 2005.]

References