Research
I'm a computational geometer--I design and analyze algorithms and data structures to manipulate geometric objects like points, lines, curves, spheres, polyhedra, and so on. Specific problem areas I work in include basic questions in combinatorial geometry and topology; analysis of realistic geometric inputs; geometric range searching; algorithms for continuously changing data; and applications of geometric algorithms to computer graphics, computer vision, robotics, spatial and temporal databases, and mesh generation.My research is currently supported by National Science Foundation under an MSPA grant (DMS-0528086). Most of my past work has been supported by NSF under four different grants — an NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, a CAREER award (CCR-0093348), two ITR grants (DMR-0121695 and CCR-0219594) — as well as a Sloan Research Fellowship.
My stuff
- My curriculum vitæ [pdf]
- My publications (also by subject area)
- My CAREER proposal: "Realistically Efficient Geometric Algorithms"
- An old list of open problems I'd really like (someone) to solve. I have many more.
- Computational Geometry Pages, a dusty but comprehensive directory of computational geometry resources both on and off the net
My local colleagues
- I have several great graduate students:
Erin Chambers,
Feida Zhu (co-advised with Jiawei Han),
Pratik Worah, and
Tracy Grauman
- I'm the nominal chair of the CS department's
algorithms
research group, a member of
of the Center for
Process Simulation and Design, an affiliate of the
Computational Science and Engineering program, and a
member of the steering committee for the
Applied Math
Program. Oof.
- Other Illinois faculty (past and present) whose academic interests overlap mine include Bob Haber, Doug West, Edgar Ramos, George Francis, Ilya Kapovich, Jean Ponce (now at ENS), John Hart, John Sullivan, Michael Garland (now at NVIDIA), Rob Ghrist, Sariel Har-Peled, Seth Hutchinson, Steve LaValle, and Zoltán Füredi.
My global colleagues
- Four of my ex-students have graduated:
- Alper Üngör
(PhD 2002), who I
stole fromco-advised with Shang-Hua Teng, is an assistant professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville. - Shripad Thite (PhD 2005) is a postdoc at the Center for the Mathematics of Information at Caltech.
- David Bunde (PhD 2006) is an assistant professor of computer science at Knox College.
- Dan Cranston (PhD 2007) is a postdoc at DIMACS/Bell Labs. (I was Dan's masters advisor; Doug West was his PhD advisor.)
- Alper Üngör
(PhD 2002), who I
- My coauthors include
Alper Üngör*,
Belén Palop,
Bob Haber,
Bojan Mohar,
Carmen Cortés,
Damrong Guoy,
David Bremner,
David Eppstein,
David Mount,
Éric Colin de Verdière,
Erik Demaine*,
Erin Chambers*,
Ferran Hurtado,
Francis Lazarus,
Fred Rothganger*,
George Hart,
Godfried Toussaint,
Greg Aloupis*,
Hai Yu*
Henk Meijer,
Ileana Streinu,
Jean Ponce,
Jeff Vitter,
Joe O'Rourke,
John Hershberger,
John Iacono,
John Sullivan,
Jorge Stolfi,
Julien Basch*,
Kim Whittlesey,
Lars Arge,
Leo Guibas,
Li Zhang*,
Mark Overmars,
Marshall Bern,
Matt DeVos,
Michael Garland,
Mike Soss*,
Oswin Aichholzer,
Pankaj Agarwal,
Pat Morin,
Paolo Franciosa,
Perouz Taslakian*,
Pratik Worah*,
Raimund Seidel,
Reza Abedi*,
Rob Ghrist,
Sariel Har-Peled,
Scott Kim,
Sergio Cabello,
Shripad Thite*,
Shuo-Heng Chung*,
Stefan Langerman,
Sue Whitesides,
Suneeta Ramaswami,
Sylvain Lazard,
Timothy Chan,
Vida Dujmovic*,
Vin de Silva,
Yong Fan*, and
Yuan Zhou*.
(*Stars indicate co-authors who were students during our first collaboration.)
- I can still lower my Erdös number, but not without writing another paper.
Me again
Here's a picture of me working in Barbados. The small folded-up piece of paper (a chain of right isosceles triangles joined along their short sides, or an unfolded paper football) and the larger multicolored toy (a chain of quarter circles joined end to end) can be moved in precisely the same ways. So in some sense, these two objects are "the same". I'm admiring the isomorphism, which is a fancy mathematical way of saying "staring off into space". My hair and my glasses are both smaller now, but alas, not my eyebrows.
I came in late to Jeff Erickson's 8:30 pm talk on "Lower Bounds in Computational Geometry." Jeff's a CS grad student at Berkeley, and when I emailed Yarvin to ask if he knew this guy Jeff who did theoretical computational geometry, he responded, "Theoretical computational geometry makes me ill."
Jeff Erickson
(jeffe@cs.uiuc.edu)
16 Aug 2005