Dianna Xu

Yilun Dianna Xu is a mathematician and computer scientist whose research concerns the computational geometry of curves and surfaces, computer vision, and computer graphics. She is a professor of computer science at Bryn Mawr College where she chairs the computer science department.^[1]

Education and career

Xu graduated from Smith College in 1996, with a bachelor's degree in computer science.^[1] She credits going to a women's college with the nurturing environment that allowed her to become interested in computer science.^[2]

She completed her Ph.D. in 2002 in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.^[1] Her dissertation, Incremental Algorithms for the Design of Triangular-Based Spline Surfaces, was supervised by Jean Gallier.^[3] After staying at Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral researcher, she joined the Bryn Mawr faculty in 2004.^[1]

Books

With Ira Greenberg and Deepak Kumar, Xu is the author of Processing: Creative Coding and Generative Art in Processing 2 (Springer, 2013), a tutorial introduction to Processing, an open-source graphical library and integrated development environment built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities. With Jean Gallier, she is the author of A Guide to the Classification Theorem for Compact Surfaces (Springer, 2013).^[4]