Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian

theoretical computer scientist computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on mathematical aspects of computer science such as the theory of computation, lambda calculus, and type theory. It is difficult to circumscribe the th ...

and an expert 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 ...

. Seidel was born in

Graz Graz (; sl, Gradec) is the capital city of the Austrian state of Styria and second-largest city in Austria after Vienna. As of 1 January 2021, it had a population of 331,562 (294,236 of whom had principal-residence status). In 2018, the popul ...

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 ...

, and studied with Hermann Maurer 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 ...

. He received his M. Sc. in 1981 from

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public university, public research university with campuses near Vancouver and in Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, it is British Columbia's oldest university. The university ranks a ...

under David G. Kirkpatrick. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from

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 ...

under the supervision of John Gilbert. After teaching at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, he moved in 1994 to

Saarland University Saarland University (german: Universität des Saarlandes, ) is a public research university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in si ...

. In 1997 he and Christoph M. Hoffmann were program chairs 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 2014, he took over as Scientific Director of the

Leibniz Center for Informatics Dagstuhl is a computer science research center in Germany, located in and named after a district of the town of Wadern, Merzig-Wadern, Saarland. Location Following the model of the mathematical center at Oberwolfach, the center is installed in ...

(LZI) from

Reinhard Wilhelm Reinhard Wilhelm (born June 5, 1946) is a German computer scientist. Life and work Wilhelm was born in , today part of the municipality of Finnentrop, Westphalia. He studied math, physics and mathematical logic at University of Münster and co ...

. Seidel invented backwards analysis of

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 and used it to analyze a simple

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 ...

algorithm that runs in linear time for problems of bounded dimension. With his student

Cecilia R. Aragon Cecilia Rodriguez Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, author, and champion competition aerobatics, aerobatic pilot who is best known as the co-inventor (with Raimund Seidel) of the treap data structure, a type of binary search t ...

in 1989 he devised the

treap In computer science, the treap and the randomized binary search tree are two closely related forms of binary search tree data structures that maintain a dynamic set of ordered keys and allow binary searches among the keys. After any sequence of in ...

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 ...

, . and he is also known for the

Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm The Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm, proposed by its authors as a potential "ultimate planar convex hull algorithm", is an algorithm for computing the convex hull of a set of points in the plane, with \mathcal(n \log h) time complexity, where n is th ...

for computing two-dimensional

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 ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Seidel, Raimund Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Austrian computer scientists German computer scientists Researchers in geometric algorithms Cornell University alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty