Joseph O'Rourke (professor)

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Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. [1] His main research interest is computational geometry.

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One of O'Rourke's early results was an algorithm for finding the minimum bounding box 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 of the point set. Nevertheless, O'Rourke found an algorithm for this problem with running time . [2]

In 1985, O'Rourke was both the local arrangements chair and the program chair of the first annual Symposium on Computational Geometry. [3] He was formerly the arXiv moderator for computational geometry and discrete mathematics. [4]

In 2012 O'Rourke was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. [5]

Books O'Rourke is the author or editor of

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Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra is a monograph on the mathematics and computational geometry of mechanical linkages, paper folding, and polyhedral nets, by Erik Demaine and Joseph O'Rourke. It was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-85757-4). A Japanese-language translation by Ryuhei Uehara was published in 2009 by the Modern Science Company (ISBN 978-4-7649-0377-7).

Art Gallery Theorems and Algorithms is a mathematical monograph on topics related to the art gallery problem, on finding positions for guards within a polygonal museum floorplan so that all points of the museum are visible to at least one guard, and on related problems in computational geometry concerning polygons. It was written by Joseph O'Rourke, and published in 1987 in the International Series of Monographs on Computer Science of the Oxford University Press. Only 1000 copies were produced before the book went out of print, so to keep this material accessible O'Rourke has made a pdf version of the book available online.

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References

  1. "Joseph O'Rourke", Faculty directory, Smith College, retrieved 2020-02-20
  2. O'Rourke, Joseph (1985), "Finding minimal enclosing boxes.", Int. J. Comput. Inform. Sci., 14 (3): 183–199, doi:10.1007/BF00991005, S2CID   8311538 . As reviewed in Zbl   0582.68067
  3. SoCG program committees, The Society for Computational Geometry, retrieved 2020-02-20
  4. Halpern, Joseph Y. (November 1998), "A Computing Research Repository", D-Lib Magazine
  5. ACM Fellows Named for Computing Innovations that Advance Technologies in Information Age Archived 2012-12-12 at the Wayback Machine , ACM, December 11, 2012.
  6. Reviews of Art Gallery Theorems and Algorithms:
  7. Reviews of Geometric Folding Algorithms:
    • Carbno, Collin (May 2009), "Review", MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America
    • Paquete, Luís (November 2009), European Journal of Operational Research, 199 (1): 311–313, doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2008.06.009 {{citation}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
    • mbec (2011), "Review", EMS Reviews, European Mathematical Society
  8. Reviews of How To Fold It:
  9. Reviews of Pop-Up Geometry:
    • French, Tom (July 2022), "Review", MAA Reviews, Mathematical Association of America
    • Kochalski, Katelynn (January 2023), "Bookshelf" (PDF), AMS Notices