Joseph S. B. Mitchell is an American

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 ...

and

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 ...

. He is Distinguished

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

and Department Chair of

Applied Mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathematical s ...

and

Statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

and Research 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 ...

Stony Brook University Stony Brook University (SBU), officially the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is a public research university in Stony Brook, New York. Along with the University at Buffalo, it is one of the State University of New York system's ...

Biography

Mitchell received a BS (1981, Physics and Applied Mathematics), and an MS (1981, Mathematics) from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, and Ph.D. (1986, Operations Research) from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

(under advisership of

Christos Papadimitriou Christos Charilaos Papadimitriou ( el, Χρήστος Χαρίλαος "Χρίστος" Παπαδημητρίου; born August 16, 1949) is a Greek theoretical computer scientist and the Donovan Family Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Un ...

). He was with

Hughes Research Laboratories Hughes may refer to: People * Hughes (surname) * Hughes (given name) Places Antarctica * Hughes Range (Antarctica), Ross Dependency * Mount Hughes, Oates Land * Hughes Basin, Oates Land * Hughes Bay, Graham Land * Hughes Bluff, Victoria Lan ...

(1981–86) and then on the faculty of

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

(1986–1991). He now serves as Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and Research Professor of Computer Science at

. He serves as Chair of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics (since 2014). Mitchell has served for several years on the Computational Geometry Steering Committee, often as Chair. He is on the editorial board of the journals ''

Discrete and Computational Geometry '' Discrete & Computational Geometry'' is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Springer. Founded in 1986 by Jacob E. Goodman and Richard M. Pollack, the journal publishes articles on discrete geometry and computational geom ...

'', '' Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications'', ''

Journal of Computational Geometry The ''Journal of Computational Geometry'' (JoCG) is an open access mathematics journal that was established in 2010. It covers research in all aspects of computational geometry. All its papers are published free of charge to both authors and reader ...

'', and the ''

Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications The ''Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications'' is an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal covering the subject of graph algorithms and graph drawing. The journal was established in 1997 and the editor-in-chief is Giuseppe Liotta (U ...

'', and is an editor-in-chief of the ''

International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications The ''International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications'' (IJCGA) is a bimonthly journal published since 1991, by World Scientific. It covers the application of computational geometry in design and analysis of algorithms, focusing on ...

''. He has served on numerous program committees and was co-chair of the PC for the 21st ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (2005).

Research

Mitchell's primary research area 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 ...

, applied to problems in

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 ...

visualization Visualization or visualisation may refer to: *Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message * Data visualization, the graphic representation of data * Information visualiz ...

air traffic management 334x334px, Air traffic management (ATM) is an aviation term encompassing all systems that assist aircraft to depart from an aerodrome, transit airspace, and land at a destination aerodrome, consisting of air traffic services (ATS) including air tr ...

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a r ...

, and

geographic information systems A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a br ...

Awards and honors

Mitchell has been an NSF Presidential Young Investigator,

Fulbright Scholar The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

, and a recipient of the President's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. He shared the 2010

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

with

Sanjeev Arora Sanjeev Arora (born January 1968) is an Indian American theoretical computer scientist. Life He was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2002–03. In 2008 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Mac ...

for devising a

polynomial-time approximation scheme In computer science (particularly algorithmics), a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) is a type of approximation algorithm for optimization problems (most often, NP-hard optimization problems). A PTAS is an algorithm which takes an insta ...

for the Euclidean

travelling salesman problem The travelling salesman problem (also called the travelling salesperson problem or TSP) asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each cit ...

. In 2011 the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

listed him 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 ...

for his research in computational geometry and

approximation algorithm In computer science and operations research, approximation algorithms are efficient algorithms that find approximate solutions to optimization problems (in particular NP-hard problems) with provable guarantees on the distance of the returned solu ...

s.ACM Names Fellows for Computing Advances that Are Driving Innovation
,

, December 8, 2011. He has also won numerous teaching awards.

References

External links

Joseph S. B. Mitchell's Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mitchell, Joseph S. B. Living people Gödel Prize laureates Stanford University alumni Researchers in geometric algorithms American computer scientists Stony Brook University faculty Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people)