Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
(CS 528)


Differential topology and combinatorial algorithms, and where this unlikely marriage works

Herbert Edelsbrunner
Arts and Sciences Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics
Duke University
Monday, May 3, 2004, 4:15PM
TCSeq 200
http://graphics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

In this talk, I will present some of our recent work in computational topology. I will introduce concepts from differential topology (Morse functions, Reeb graphs, Jacobi sets, ...) and algebraic topology (Betti numbers, persistence, ...) and discuss how they can be computed for piecewise linear data. There are numerous applications of these ideas and I will focus primarily on problems in structural biology.

About the Speaker

Herbert Edelsbrunner received his Ph.D. in Technical Mathematics in 1982 from the University of Technology in Graz, Austria. He was faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1985 until he joined Duke University in 1999. His primary research interests are in algorithms, geometry and topology, and structural biology. He published two textbooks in computational geometry. In 1996, he co-founded Raindrop Geomagic, a software company that specializes in geometric modeling and shape reconstruction from scan data.


Contact: bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu

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