Biographical Information


Visiting Professor at the Berlin Mathematical School 2007-08
Visiting Professor in the Departement d'Informatique at the Ecole Normale Superieur May-June 2007
Moore Distinguished Scholar in Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology Spring 2006
Professor of Mathematics at Duke University 2004-present
Visiting Professor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Spring 2002
Arts and Sciences Professor of Computer Science at Duke University 1999-present
Founder, Principal, and Director, Raindrop Geomagic 1996-present
Visiting Professor in Computer Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology 1994-95
Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1985-99
Assistant Professor in Information Processing at the Graz University of Technology 1981-85













I always loved mathematics and in particular geometry. My next favorite subject is philosophy. I like to dream about the space around us and the shapes it contains. How can we understand the unlimited variety of form and how can we grasp the mind-boggling complexity of shapes changing under motion?






My research area are: computational geometry and topology, algorithms and data structures, geometric modeling, and computational structural biology.



 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, reading mathematics and sometimes philosophy books, and playing with my daughter.





Ping Fu and I started a company in April 1996. This turns out to be more demanding than we believed although we were warned.
I visited the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HKUST, for one academic year in 1994-95. The campus is beautiful and away from the city.



I am very happy with my life, although it gets too busy at times.





Post-docs and Students

I am advising four graduate students at various stages of their program. Bei Wang works on efficient algorithms for elevation maxima and the statistics of clusters and persistence. Amit Patel works on Reeb sets, Jacobi sets, and contours. Brittany Fasy looks at the heat equation through the lense of persistence diagrams and vineyards. Ying Zheng builds algorithms and software for the reconstruction of 3D plant roots from series of images.

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, and NSF funded project on identifying genes for root system architecture traits and an NIH funded center for systems biology.

Teaching

In the Spring of 2000, I am teaching CPS 102, our undergraduate course on the Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science.

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 categorized my publications into books, surveys, alpha shapes, applications to biology, meshes, topology, arrangements, combinatorial geometry, geometric data structures, geometric algorithms.

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



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