Yilun Dianna Xu is a

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

whose research concerns the

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 ar ...

of curves and surfaces,

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

, and

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...

. She is a professor of

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United St ...

where she chairs the computer science department.

Education and career

Xu graduated from

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smith (Smith College ...

in 1996, with a bachelor's degree in computer science. She credits going to a women's college with the nurturing environment that allowed her to become interested in computer science. She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 in computer and information science at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

. Her dissertation, ''Incremental Algorithms for the Design of Triangular-Based Spline Surfaces'', was supervised by

Jean Gallier Jean Henri Gallier (born 1949) is a researcher in computational logic at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds appointments in the Computer and Information Science Department and the Department of Mathematics. Biography Gallier was born J ...

. After staying at Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral researcher, she joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 2004.

Books

With Ira Greenberg and Deepak Kumar, Xu is the author of ''Processing: Creative Coding and Generative Art in Processing 2'' (Springer, 2013), a tutorial introduction to

Processing Processing is a free graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming ...

, an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

graphical library and

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...

built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities. With

, she is the author of '' A Guide to the Classification Theorem for Compact Surfaces'' (Springer, 2013).

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Xu, Dianna Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists 21st-century American mathematicians American women mathematicians American women computer scientists Smith College alumni Bryn Mawr College faculty Researchers in geometric algorithms 21st-century women mathematicians 21st-century American women