Joseph O'Rourke (professor)
Encyclopedia
Joseph O'Rourke is the Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College
and the chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry
.
O'Rourke was the first person to publish an algorithm to determine the minimum bounding box
of a point set in three dimensions.
In 1985, O'Rourke was the program chair of the first annual Symposium on Computational Geometry
. He was formerly the arXiv
moderator for computational geometry and discrete mathematics
.
Smith College
Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
and the chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is 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...
.
O'Rourke was the first person to publish an algorithm to determine the minimum bounding box
Minimum bounding box
The minimum or smallest bounding or enclosing box for a point set in N dimensions is the box with the smallest measure within which all the points lie...
of a point set in three dimensions.
In 1985, O'Rourke was the program chair of the first annual 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...
. He was formerly the arXiv
ArXiv
The arXiv |Chi]], χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all...
moderator for computational geometry and discrete mathematics
Discrete mathematics
Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that are fundamentally discrete rather than continuous. In contrast to real numbers that have the property of varying "smoothly", the objects studied in discrete mathematics – such as integers, graphs, and statements in logic – do not...
.