Ferran Hurtado Díaz (8 May 1951 – 2 October 2014) was a Spanish

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 ...

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 ...

Life

Hurtado was born on 8 May 1951 in

Valencia Valencia ( va, València) is the capital of the Autonomous communities of Spain, autonomous community of Valencian Community, Valencia and the Municipalities of Spain, third-most populated municipality in Spain, with 791,413 inhabitants. It is ...

, Spain. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the

Polytechnic University of Catalonia The Technical University of Catalonia ( ca, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, , es, link=no, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña; UPC), currently referred to as BarcelonaTech, is the largest engineering university in Catalonia, Spai ...

Barcelona Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...

in 1993 under the supervision of Oriol Serra Albó; his dissertation was ''Problemas geométricos de visibilidad'' 'Geometric problems of visibility'' It won the ''Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado UPC'' in 1995. He became a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and died on 2 October 2014 in Barcelona.

Contributions

Hurtado was a pioneer of Spanish

, and of connections between computational geometry and

combinatorics Combinatorics is an area of mathematics primarily concerned with counting, both as a means and an end in obtaining results, and certain properties of finite structures. It is closely related to many other areas of mathematics and has many appl ...

. He is known, not only for his own research contributions to those subjects, but also for the questions he posed for others to solve. The topics of his research included

flip graph In mathematics, a flip graph is a graph whose vertices are combinatorial or geometric objects, and whose edges link two of these objects when they can be obtained from one another by an elementary operation called a flip. Flip graphs are spec ...

s of

polygon triangulation In computational geometry, polygon triangulation is the partition of a polygonal area (simple polygon) into a set of triangles, i.e., finding a set of triangles with pairwise non-intersecting interiors whose union is . Triangulations may be v ...

Voronoi diagram In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions close to each of a given set of objects. In the simplest case, these objects are just finitely many points in the plane (called seeds, sites, or generators). For each seed th ...

visibility The visibility is the measure of the distance at which an object or light can be clearly discerned. In meteorology it depends on the transparency of the surrounding air and as such, it is unchanging no matter the ambient light level or time of ...

simple polygon In geometry, a simple polygon is a polygon that does not Intersection (Euclidean geometry), intersect itself and has no holes. That is, it is a flat shape consisting of straight, non-intersecting line segments or "sides" that are joined pairwise ...

s with given points as vertices, empty convex polygons in point sets,

geometric graph theory Geometric graph theory in the broader sense is a large and amorphous subfield of graph theory, concerned with graphs defined by geometric means. In a stricter sense, geometric graph theory studies combinatorial and geometric properties of geomet ...

, and problems on colored sets of points.

Recognition

In 2018, the journal ''

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 ...

'' published a special issue in Hurtado's memory.

References

External links

Ferran Hurtado's personal webpage

Ferran Hurtado Memorial
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hurtado, Ferran 1951 births 2014 deaths Spanish computer scientists Theoretical computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms