Raimund Seidel
German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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. He was the vice president for Research and Technology Transfer at Saarland University from 1999 to 2003.[5] In 2014, he took over as Scientific Director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics (LZI) from Reinhard Wilhelm.[6] In May 2025, he was succeeded in this position by Holger Hermans.[7] Seidel was elected as the vice president for Sustainable Development and Strategy of Saarland University in 2024.[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.[8] With his student Cecilia R. Aragon in 1989 he devised the treap data structure,[9][10][11] and he is also known for the Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm for computing two-dimensional convex hulls.[12]
