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, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...
and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is
computational geometry.
One of O'Rourke's early results was an algorithm for finding the
minimum bounding box
In geometry, the minimum bounding box or smallest bounding box (also known as the minimum enclosing box or smallest enclosing box) for a point set in dimensions is the box with the smallest measure (area, volume, or hypervolume in higher dime ...
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, 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
.
In 1985, O'Rourke was both the local arrangements chair and the program chair of the first annual
Symposium on Computational Geometry. He was formerly the
arXiv
arXiv (pronounced as "archive"—the X represents the Chi (letter), 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 Scholarly pee ...
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.
Books O'Rourke is the author or editor of
* ''
Art Gallery Theorems and Algorithms'' (1987). PDF of boo
* ''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, Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra'', with
Erik D. Demaine (2007).
* ''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
ref>Reviews of ''Pop-Up Geometry'':
*
*
* Hammack, R.H. Pop-Up Geometry: ''The Mathematics Behind Pop-Up Cards'' by Joseph O’Rourke. ''Math Intelligencer'' (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-024-10369-8
*''Reshaping Convex Polyhedra'', with Costin Vîlcu. Springer-Verlag. March, 2024. ISBN 978-3-031-47510-8
References
External links
Home page*
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
American computer scientists
Researchers in geometric algorithms
Smith College faculty
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