Raimund Seidel

Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist and an expert in computational geometry.

Seidel was born in Graz, Austria, and studied with Hermann Maurer at the Graz University of Technology.^[1] He earned his M.Sc. in 1981 from University of British Columbia under David G. Kirkpatrick.^[2] He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Cornell University under the supervision of John Gilbert.^[3] After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved in 1994 to Saarland University.^[4] In 1997, he and Christoph M. Hoffmann were program chairs for the Symposium on Computational Geometry. In 2014, he took over as Scientific Director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics (LZI) from Reinhard Wilhelm.^[5]

Seidel invented backwards analysis of randomized algorithms and used it to analyze a simple linear programming algorithm that runs in linear time for problems of bounded dimension.^[6] With his student Cecilia R. Aragon in 1989 he devised the treap data structure,^[7]^[8] and he is also known for the Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm for computing two-dimensional convex hulls.^[9]

[1]
Profile Archived 2007-10-30 at the Wayback Machine in program for conference on significant advances in computer science, Graz University of Technology, 2007.
[2]
Seidel, Raimund (1981). A convex hull algorithm optimal for point sets in even dimensions (M. Sc.). University of British Columbia. OCLC 606375013.
[3]
Raimund G. Seidel at the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
[4]
Profile at the Multimodal Computing and Interaction cluster, Saarland University.
[5]
Internationally renowned informatics center names new Scientific Director, Schloss Dagstuhl, March 30, 2014, retrieved 2014-05-06.
[6]
Seidel, R. (1991), "Small-dimensional linear programming and convex hulls made easy", Discrete & Computational Geometry, 6 (1): 423–434, doi:10.1007/BF02574699.
[7]
Aragon, Cecilia R.; Seidel, Raimund (1989), "Randomized Search Trees", Proc. 30th Symp. Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 1989), Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 540–545, doi:10.1109/SFCS.1989.63531, ISBN 978-0-8186-1982-3, S2CID 47386481
[8]
Seidel, Raimund; Aragon, Cecilia R. (1996), "Randomized Search Trees", Algorithmica, 16 (4/5): 464–497, doi:10.1007/s004539900061.
[9]
Kirkpatrick, David G.; Seidel, Raimund (1986), "The ultimate planar convex hull algorithm", SIAM Journal on Computing, 15 (1): 287–299, doi:10.1137/0215021, hdl:1813/6417.

References