Herbert Edelsbrunner
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Herbert Edelsbrunner (born March 14, 1958) is a computer scientist working in the field of computational geometry, the Arts & Science Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at
Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
, Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), and the co-founder of
Geomagic Geomagic is the professional engineering software brand of Hexagon AB. The products are focused on computer-aided design, with an emphasis on 3D scanning and other non-traditional design methodologies, such as voxel-based modeling with haptic in ...
, Inc. He was the first of only three computer scientists to win the
National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
's Alan T. Waterman Award.


Academic biography

Edelsbrunner was born in 1958 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 ...
.Who is Who – Cyberworlds 2007
.
He received his
Diplom A ''Diplom'' (, from ) is an academic degree in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a similarly named degree in some other European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia ...
in 1980 and Ph.D. in 1982, both from Graz University of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled ''Intersection Problems in Computational Geometry'' obtained under the supervision of Hermann Maurer. After a brief assistant professorship at Graz, he joined the faculty of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...
in 1985, and moved to
Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
in 1999. In 1996, with Ping Fu (then director of visualization at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers in the United States. NCSA is currently led by Professor Bill ...
and his wife), he co-founded
Geomagic Geomagic is the professional engineering software brand of Hexagon AB. The products are focused on computer-aided design, with an emphasis on 3D scanning and other non-traditional design methodologies, such as voxel-based modeling with haptic in ...
, a company that develops shape modeling software. Since August 2009 he is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) in Klosterneuburg. In 1991, Edelsbrunner received the Alan T. Waterman Award. He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
in 2005, and received an honorary doctorate from Graz University of Technology in 2006. In 2008 he was elected to the
German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (), in short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded on 1 January 1652, based on academic models in Italy, it was originally named the ''Academi ...
. In 2014 he became one of ten inaugural fellows of the
European Association for Theoretical Computer Science The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) is an international organization with a European focus, founded in 1972. Its aim is to facilitate the exchange of ideas and results among theoretical computer scientists as well as ...
. He is also a member of the
Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of humanities, letters, law, and sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europe ...
.


Publications

Edelsbrunner has over 100 research publications and is an
ISI highly cited researcher The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis ...
. He has also published four books on computational geometry: ''Algorithms in Combinatorial Geometry'' (Springer-Verlag, 1987, ), ''Geometry and Topology for Mesh Generation'' (Cambridge University Press, 2001, ), ''Computational Topology'' (American Mathematical Society, 2009, 978-0821849255) and ''A Short Course in Computational Geometry and Topology'' (Springer-Verlag, 2014, ). As Edelsbrunner's Waterman Award citation states,


Research contributions

Edelsbrunner's most heavily cited research contribution 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 In algebraic geometry and computational geometry, general position is a notion of genericity for a set of points, or other geometric objects. It means the ''general case'' situation, as opposed to some more special or coincidental cases that a ...
(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 segment In geometry, a line segment is a part of a line (mathematics), straight line that is bounded by two distinct endpoints (its extreme points), and contains every Point (geometry), point on the line that is between its endpoints. It is a special c ...
s, construction of K-sets, the
ham sandwich theorem In mathematical measure theory, for every positive integer the ham sandwich theorem states that given measurable "objects" in -dimensional Euclidean space, it is possible to divide each one of them in half (with respect to their Measure (mathem ...
,
Delaunay triangulation In computational geometry, a Delaunay triangulation or Delone triangulation of a set of points in the plane subdivides their convex hull into triangles whose circumcircles do not contain any of the points; that is, each circumcircle has its gen ...
, point location, interval trees, fractional cascading, and protein docking..


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Edelsbrunner, Herbert 1958 births Living people American computer scientists Austrian computer scientists University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign faculty Duke University faculty Researchers in geometric algorithms Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of Academia Europaea Graz University of Technology alumni