David Arthur Eppstein (born 1963) is an American computer scientist and

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, mathematical structure, structure, space, Mathematica ...

. He is a Distinguished Professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at the

University of California, Irvine The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...

. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. In 2011, he was named an ACM Fellow.

Biography

Born in Windsor, England, in 1963, Eppstein received a B.S. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1984, and later an M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in computer science from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...

, after which he took a postdoctoral position at

Xerox Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from St ...

's Palo Alto Research Center. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1990, and was co-chair of the Computer Science Department there from 2002 to 2005. In 2014, he was named a Chancellor's Professor. In October 2017, Eppstein was one of 396 members elected as fellows of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

. Eppstein is also an amateur digital photographer.

Research interests

In computer science, Eppstein's research has included work on minimum spanning trees,

shortest path In graph theory, the shortest path problem is the problem of finding a path between two vertices (or nodes) in a graph such that the sum of the weights of its constituent edges is minimized. The problem of finding the shortest path between t ...

s, dynamic graph data structures,

graph coloring In graph theory, graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. In its simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices ...

, graph drawing and geometric optimization. He has published also in application areas such as

finite element meshing The finite element method (FEM) is a popular method for numerically solving differential equations arising in engineering and mathematical modeling A mathematical model is a description of a system using mathematical concepts and language. ...

, which is used in engineering design, and in computational statistics, particularly in robust, multivariate, nonparametric statistics. Eppstein served as the program chair for the theory track of the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry in 2001, the program chair of the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in 2002, and the co-chair for the International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2009.

Selected publications

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Books

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References

External links

David Eppstein's profile
at the