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 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, contours, and the robustness of intersections.
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, an NSF funded project on identifying genes for root
system architecture traits and an NIH funded center for systems biology.
Teaching
In the Spring of 2009, I was 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,
survey papers,
and research papers.
There are quite a few of the latter, so I further partition
the category into
topology,
mesh generation,
alpha shapes, and
biology applications,
as well as
arrangements,
combinatorial geometry,
geometric data structures, and
geometric algorithms.
Every paper appears only in one list even if it would fit in two or more categories.
This makes it sometimes more difficult to search but I am not fond of repetitions.
Alternatively, I list all papers in
reverse chronological order,
using the year of the publication.
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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