Emmerich (Emo) Welzl (born 4 August 1958 in

Linz Linz ( , ; cs, Linec) is the capital of Upper Austria and third-largest city in Austria. In the north of the country, it is on the Danube south of the Czech border. In 2018, the population was 204,846. In 2009, it was a European Capital of ...

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

)Curriculum vitae
retrieved 2012-02-11. is a computer scientist known for his research in

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 ...

. He is a professor in the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science at

ETH Zurich (colloquially) , former_name = eidgenössische polytechnische Schule , image = ETHZ.JPG , image_size = , established = , type = Public , budget = CHF 1.896 billion (2021) , rector = Günther Dissertori , president = Joël Mesot , ac ...

Switzerland ). Swiss law does not designate a ''capital'' as such, but the federal parliament and government are installed in Bern, while other federal institutions, such as the federal courts, are in other cities (Bellinzona, Lausanne, Luzern, Neuchâtel ...

Biography

Welzl was born on 4 August 1958 in

. He studied at the

Graz University of Technology Graz University of Technology (german: link=no, Technische Universität Graz, short ''TU Graz'') is one of five universities in Styria, Austria. It was founded in 1811 by Archduke John of Austria and is the oldest science and technology research ...

receiving a

Diplom A ''Diplom'' (, from grc, δίπλωμα ''diploma'') is an academic degree in the German-speaking countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and a similarly named degree in some other European countries including Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus ...

in Applied Mathematics in 1981 and a doctorate in 1983 under the supervision of Hermann Maurer. Following postdoctoral studies at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

, he became a professor at the

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

in 1987 at age 28 and was the youngest professor in Germany. Since 1996 he has been professor of Computer Science at the

. Welzl is a member of multiple journal editorial boards, and has been program chair for the

Symposium on Computational Geometry The International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG) is an academic conference in computational geometry. It was founded in 1985, and was originally sponsored by the SIGACT and SIGGRAPH Special Interest Groups of the Association for Computin ...

in 1995, one of the tracks of the

International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming ICALP, the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming is an academic conference organized annually by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and held in different locations around Europe. Like most theore ...

in 2000, and one of the tracks of the

European Symposium on Algorithms The European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA) is an international conference covering the field of algorithms. It has been held annually since 1993, typically in early Autumn in a different European location each year. Like most theoretical computer ...

in 2007.

Research

Much of Welzl's research has been in

. With

David Haussler David Haussler (born 1953) is an American bioinformatician known for his work leading the team that assembled the first human genome sequence in the race to complete the Human Genome Project and subsequently for comparative genome analysis that d ...

, he showed that machinery from

computational learning theory In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms. Overview Theoretical results in machine learning m ...

including ε-nets and

VC dimension VC may refer to: Military decorations * Victoria Cross, a military decoration awarded by the United Kingdom and also by certain Commonwealth nations ** Victoria Cross for Australia ** Victoria Cross (Canada) ** Victoria Cross for New Zealand * Vic ...

could be useful in geometric problems such as the development of space-efficient

range searching In computer science, the range searching problem consists of processing a set ''S'' of objects, in order to determine which objects from ''S'' intersect with a query object, called the ''range''. For example, if ''S'' is a set of points correspond ...

data structure In computer science, a data structure is a data organization, management, and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, a ...

s. He devised

linear time In computer science, the time complexity is the computational complexity that describes the amount of computer time it takes to run an algorithm. Time complexity is commonly estimated by counting the number of elementary operations performed by ...

randomized algorithm A randomized algorithm is an algorithm that employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic or procedure. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performan ...

s for the

smallest circle problem The smallest-circle problem (also known as minimum covering circle problem, bounding circle problem, least bounding circle problem, smallest enclosing circle problem) is a mathematical problem of computing the smallest circle that contains all of ...

and for low-dimensional

linear programming Linear programming (LP), also called linear optimization, is a method to achieve the best outcome (such as maximum profit or lowest cost) in a mathematical model whose requirements are represented by linear function#As a polynomial function, li ...

, and developed the combinatorial framework of

LP-type problem In the study of algorithms, an LP-type problem (also called a generalized linear program) is an optimization problem that shares certain properties with low-dimensional linear programs and that may be solved by similar algorithms. LP-type problems i ...

s that generalizes both of these problems. Other highly cited research publications by Welzl and his co-authors describe algorithms for constructing

visibility graph In computational geometry and robot motion planning, a visibility graph is a graph of intervisible locations, typically for a set of points and obstacles in the Euclidean plane. Each node in the graph represents a point location, and each edge repr ...

s and using them to find shortest paths among obstacles in the plane, test whether two point sets can be mapped to each other by a combination of a geometric transformation and a small perturbation, and pioneer the use of

space-filling curve In mathematical analysis, a space-filling curve is a curve whose range contains the entire 2-dimensional unit square (or more generally an ''n''-dimensional unit hypercube). Because Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) was the first to discover one, space ...

s for range query data structures.

Awards and honors

Welzl won the

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (german: link=no, Förderpreis für deutsche Wissenschaftler im Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Programm der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft), in short Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to ...

in 1995. He was an Invited Speaker of the

International Congress of Mathematicians The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics. It meets once every four years, hosted by the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize (to be rename ...

in Berlin in 1998. He was elected as an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

in 1998, as a member of the

German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (german: Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften), short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded ...

in 2005, of the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

in 2006, and of the

Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (german: Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften), abbreviated BBAW, is the official academic society for the natural sciences and humanities for the States of Germany, German ...

in 2007.Member profile

, retrieved 2012-02-11.

References

External links

Home page
at ETH Zurich {{DEFAULTSORT:Welzl, Emo 1958 births Living people Austrian computer scientists Swiss computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Free University of Berlin faculty ETH Zurich faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Members of Academia Europaea Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winners