Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist and an expert in computational geometry. Seidel was born in

Graz Graz () is the capital of the Austrian Federal states of Austria, federal state of Styria and the List of cities and towns in Austria, second-largest city in Austria, after Vienna. On 1 January 2025, Graz had a population of 306,068 (343,461 inc ...

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

, and studied with Hermann Maurer at the Graz University of Technology. He earned his M.Sc. in 1981 from

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

under David G. Kirkpatrick. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

under the supervision of John Gilbert. After teaching at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, he moved in 1994 to Saarland University. In 1997, he and Christoph M. Hoffmann were program chairs for the Symposium on Computational Geometry. In 2014, he took over as Scientific Director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics (LZI) from Reinhard Wilhelm. Seidel invented backwards analysis of

randomized algorithm A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...

s and used it to analyze a simple

linear programming Linear programming (LP), also called linear optimization, is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements and objective are represented by linear function#As a polynomia ...

algorithm that runs in linear time for problems of bounded dimension. With his student Cecilia R. Aragon in 1989 he devised the treap

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for Efficiency, efficient Data access, access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships amo ...

, . and he is also known for the Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm for computing two-dimensional

convex hull In geometry, the convex hull, convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space, ...

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Seidel, Raimund Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Austrian computer scientists German computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Cornell University alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty Austrian expatriates in the United States