David Arthur Eppstein (born 1963) is an American computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 and mathematician

Mathematician

A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....

. He is professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

. He is known for his work in computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

, graph algorithms

Graph theory

In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

, and recreational mathematics

Recreational mathematics

Recreational mathematics is an umbrella term, referring to mathematical puzzles and mathematical games.Not all problems in this field require a knowledge of advanced mathematics, and thus, recreational mathematics often attracts the curiosity of non-mathematicians, and inspires their further study...

.

Biography

Born in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 of New Zealand

New Zealand

New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

er parents, Eppstein is a United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 citizen. He received a B.S.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 from Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 in 1984, and later an M.S.

Master of Science

A Master of Science is a postgraduate academic master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is typically studied for in the sciences including the social sciences.-Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay:...

 (1985) and Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 (1989) in computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, after which he took a postdoctoral position at Xerox

Xerox

Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...

's Palo Alto Research Center. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1990, and was co-chair of the Computer Science Department there from 2002 to 2005.

Research interests

In computer science, Eppstein's research is focused mostly in computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

: minimum spanning tree

Minimum spanning tree

Given a connected, undirected graph, a spanning tree of that graph is a subgraph that is a tree and connects all the vertices together. A single graph can have many different spanning trees...

s, shortest paths, dynamic graph data structures, graph coloring

Graph coloring

In graph theory, graph coloring is a special case of graph labeling; it is an assignment of labels traditionally called "colors" to elements of a graph subject to certain constraints. In its simplest form, it is a way of coloring the vertices of a graph such that no two adjacent vertices share the...

, graph drawing

Graph drawing

Graph drawing is an area of mathematics and computer science combining methods from geometric graph theory and information visualization to derive two-dimensional depictions of graphs arising from applications such as social network analysis, cartography, and bioinformatics...

 and geometric optimization

Optimization (mathematics)

In mathematics, computational science, or management science, mathematical optimization refers to the selection of a best element from some set of available alternatives....

. He has published also in application areas such as finite element meshing, which is used in engineering design, and in computational statistics

Computational statistics

Computational statistics, or statistical computing, is the interface between statistics and computer science. It is the area of computational science specific to the mathematical science of statistics....

, particularly in robust

Robust statistics

Robust statistics provides an alternative approach to classical statistical methods. The motivation is to produce estimators that are not unduly affected by small departures from model assumptions.- Introduction :...

, multivariate

Multivariate statistics

Multivariate statistics is a form of statistics encompassing the simultaneous observation and analysis of more than one statistical variable. The application of multivariate statistics is multivariate analysis...

, nonparametric statistics.

Eppstein is a current Editorial Board member for the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. He has been an associate editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Algorithms, on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Algorithms and the SIAM Journal on Computing

SIAM Journal on Computing

The SIAM Journal on Computing is a scientific journal focusing on the mathematical and formal aspects of computer science. It is published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics . As of September 2008, Éva Tardos serves as editor-in-chief.-External links:** on DBLP...

, and a guest editor on the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications

Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications

The Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications is an open access electronically published academic journal devoted to the subject of graph algorithms and graph drawing....

. Eppstein served as the conference program chair or co-chair for the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry

Symposium on Computational Geometry

The Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry is an academic conference in computational geometry. It was founded in 1985, and in most but not all of its years it has been sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGACT and SIGGRAPH special interest groups.A 2010 assessment of...

 2001, the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 2002, and the International Symposium on Graph Drawing

International Symposium on Graph Drawing

The International Symposium on Graph Drawing is an annual academic conference in which researchers present peer reviewed papers on graph drawing, information visualization of network information, geometric graph theory, and related topics.-Significance:...

 2009.

Selected publications

Republished in

Awards

Eppstein received the NSF

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...

 Young Investigator Award (1992–1999), and has also been awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship (1984–1987).

External links

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