Biographical Information
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I always loved mathematics and in particular geometry and topology.
My next favorite subject is philosophy.
I am still curious why we are here.
I have no illustions that we will ever know,
but at least I would like to understand
what we are all doing here.
My research evolved from algorithms and data structures to
computational geometry and computational topology.
It might sometimes not be obvious, but I use applications
to determine the direction of my research,
keeping in mind that the most applicable of all is a good theory.
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I was born and grew up in Austria.
I visited the United States in 1985 and made an overnight decision to leave
Austria and come to the US, possibly for a few years.
With no time left for planning I accepted the offer from the
University of Illinois. I have stayed there until 1999
when I moved to my current position at Duke University.
My spare time interests include listening to music,
playing with my daughter,
and reading books on mathematics, philosophy, politics, biology,
neurobiology, and on rare occasons a novel.
Ping Fu and I started a
company in April 1996.
This turns out to be more demanding than we believed
although we were warned.
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| I decided to join the new
Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, near Vienna, starting
August 2009. This promises to be challenging and invigorating. |
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Post-docs and Students
I am currently working with three post-doctoral fellows.
Chao Chen
graduated in 2009 from the Computer Science Department
at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
He works on topological algorithms, including optimal cycle structures
and applications to computer vision.
Michael Kerber
graduated in 2009 from the Computer Science Department
at the Saarland University.
He is interested in fast algorithms for topology and images.
Olga Symonova
received her doctorate from the University of Trento and
was postdoc at Georgia Tech working on biologically motivated
shape modeling questions.
She continues her work on the growth modeling of agricultural root systems.
I am advising four graduate students at various stages of their program.
Brittany Fasy
looks at curves in three and higher dimensions as well as
the heat equation through the lense of
persistence diagrams and vineyards.
Ying Zheng
works on algorithm for symmetry in images and shapes.
Research
In the year 2005, we started two DARPA funded projects.
The first is on
tda,
short for ``algebraic topological tools for high dimensional data analysis
and the study of families of shapes''.
Under its umbrella we develop algorithms for homology groups,
persistence, Morse complexes and more.
The second is on
funbio,
short for ``microstates to macrodynamics: a new mathematics of biology''.
It aims at deepening our understanding of broad biological questions through
the use of novel mathematical methods.
Data analysis with algebraic topology is one of the new methods.
I am also involved in biology projects lead by Philip Benfey.
In particular, an NSF funded project on identifying genes for root
system architecture traits and an NIH funded center for systems biology.
Teaching
During the Fall and Winter of 2010/11, I co-teach a course on
Computational Topology
with Paul Bendich at IST Austria.
Software
The Alpha Shapes software
is designed to analyze point data in three dimensions. It specializes
on molecular conformations, where a molecule is given as a set of atoms
and each atom is a sphere given by its center (a point) and radius.
For surface reconstruction I recommend
Geomagic Wrap instead.
I used that software to create the
180 wrapped tubes, which
you can download in .stl format and print if you have a layered
technology machine.
Publications
I list my publications in
reverse chronological order.
Contact Information
 Email: edels@cs.duke.edu
 Home Page: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~edels
Office Location: D203 LSRC
Phone: (919) 660-6545
Fax: (919) 660-6519
USmail:
Herbert Edelsbrunner
Duke University
Computer Science Department
Box 90129
Durham, NC 27708
Last Change: today
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