Elaine Cohen
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elaine Cohen (July 17, 1946 – October 19, 2025[1]) was an American researcher in geometric modeling and computer graphics, known for her pioneering research on B-splines.[2] She was a professor in the school of computing at the University of Utah.[3]
Cohen graduated from Vassar College in 1968, with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. She went to Syracuse University for graduate study in mathematics, earning a master's degree in 1970 and completing her doctorate in 1974.[4] Her dissertation, On the Degree of Approximation of a Function by Partial Sums of its Fourier Series, concerned approximation theory, and was supervised by Daniel Waterman.[5]
At the University of Utah, Cohen became the first woman to gain tenure at the School of Engineering.[6]
Contributions
With Richard F. Riesenfeld and Gershon Elber, Cohen is the author of the book Geometric Modeling with Splines: An Introduction (AK Peters, 2001).[7]
She has also contributed to the development of the Utah teapot, improving it from a two-dimensional surface with no thickness to a bona-fide three-dimensional object.[8]
