Herbert Edelsbrunner

In 1991, Edelsbrunner received the Alan T. Waterman Award. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and received an honorary doctorate from Graz University of Technology in 2006. In 2008 he was elected to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2014 he became one of ten inaugural fellows of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. He is also a member of the Academia Europaea.

Dr. Edelsbrunner is a pioneer in the field of computational geometry. ... Dr. Edelsbrunner has had a tremendous impact on computational geometry by his own research as well as by his 1987 book Algorithms in Combinatorial Geometry which systematized the field in its early days. This book is considered by many people to be still the best textbook and reference source on computational geometry.

Herbert Edelsbrunner (born 1958) is a computer scientist working in the field of computational geometry, the Arts & Science Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Duke University, Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria), and the co-founder of Geomagic, Inc. He was the first of only three computer scientists to win the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award.

Edelsbrunner was born in 1958 in Graz, Austria. He received his Ph.D. in 1982 from Graz University of Technology, under the supervision of Hermann Maurer; his thesis was entitled “Intersection Problems in Computational Geometry.” After a brief assistant professorship at Graz, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985, and moved to Duke University in 1999. In 1996, with Ping Fu (then director of visualization at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and his wife), he co-founded Geomagic, a company that develops shape modeling software. Since August 2009 he is Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) in Klosterneuburg.