Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at

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 ...

and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is

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 ...

. One of O'Rourke's early results was an algorithm for finding the

minimum bounding box In geometry, the minimum or smallest bounding or enclosing box for a point set in dimensions is the box with the smallest measure (area, volume, or hypervolume in higher dimensions) within which all the points lie. When other kinds of measure ...

of a point set in three dimensions when the box is not required to be axis-aligned. The problem is made difficult by the fact that the optimal box may not share any of its face planes with the

convex hull In geometry, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space ...

of the point set. Nevertheless, O'Rourke found an algorithm for this problem with running time

O(n^3)

. In 1985, O'Rourke was the program chair of the first annual

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 ...

. He was formerly the

arXiv arXiv (pronounced "archive"—the X represents the Greek letter chi ⟨χ⟩) is an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints (known as e-prints) approved for posting after moderation, but not peer review. It consists of ...

moderator for computational geometry and

discrete mathematics Discrete mathematics is the study of mathematical structures that can be considered "discrete" (in a way analogous to discrete variables, having a bijection with the set of natural numbers) rather than "continuous" (analogously to continuous f ...

. In 2012 O'Rourke was named a

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

Books

O'Rourke is the author or editor of: * '' Art Gallery Theorems and Algorithms'' (1987)

* ''Computational Geometry in C,'' 2nd Ed. (1998).

* ''Handbook of Discrete and Computational Geometry'', with Jacob E. Goodman and Csaba Tóth. 3rd Ed. (2017). * '' Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra'', with Erik D. Demaine (2007). Reviews of ''Geometric Folding Algorithms'': * * * * * ''Discrete and Computational Geometry'', with Satyan Devadoss (2011).

* ''How To Fold It: The Mathematics of Linkages, Origami, and Polyhedra'' (2011).

*''Pop-Up Geometry: The Mathematics behind Pop-Up Cards'' (2022). ISBN 978-009-09626-3

References

External links

Home page
* Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Smith College faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery {{compu-scientist-stub