Raimund G. Seidel is a professor of computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

 at the Universität des Saarlandes

Saarland University

Saarland University is a university located in Saarbrücken, the capital of the German state of Saarland, and Homburg. It was founded in 1948 in Homburg in co-operation with France and is organized in 8 faculties that cover all major fields of science...

 and an expert in computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

.

Seidel was born in Graz

Graz

The more recent population figures do not give the whole picture as only people with principal residence status are counted and people with secondary residence status are not. Most of the people with secondary residence status in Graz are students...

, Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

, and studied with Hermann Maurer

Hermann Maurer

Hermann Maurer is an Austrian computer scientist, serving as Professor of Computer Science at the Graz University of Technology. He has supervised over 40 dissertations, written more than 20 books and over 600 scientific articles, and started or been involved with a number of...

 at the Graz University of Technology

Graz University of Technology

The Graz University of Technology is the second largest university in Styria, Austria, after the University of Graz. Austria has three universities of technology – in Graz, in Leoben, and in Vienna. The Graz University of Technology was founded in 1811 by Archduke John of Austria. TUG, as the...

. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 under the supervision of John Gilbert. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, he moved in 1994 to Saarland. In 1997 he and Christoph M. Hoffmann were program chairs for the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry.

Seidel invented backwards analysis of randomized algorithm

Randomized algorithm

A randomized algorithm is an algorithm which employs a degree of randomness as part of its logic. The algorithm typically uses uniformly random bits as an auxiliary input to guide its behavior, in the hope of achieving good performance in the "average case" over all possible choices of random bits...

s and used it to analyze a simple linear programming

Linear programming

Linear programming is a mathematical method for determining a way to achieve the best outcome in a given mathematical model for some list of requirements represented as linear relationships...

 algorithm that runs in linear time for problems of bounded dimension. With his student Cecilia R. Aragon

Cecilia R. Aragon

Cecilia R. Aragon is an American computer scientist, professor, and championaerobatic pilot.In computer science, she is best known as the co-inventor of the treap data structure, a type of binary search tree that orders nodes by adding a priority as well as a key to each node...

 in 1989 he devised the treap

Treap

In computer science, the treap and the randomized binary search tree are two closely related forms of binary search tree data structures that maintain a dynamic set of ordered keys and allow binary searches among the keys...

 data structure

Data structure

In computer science, a data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently.Different kinds of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks...

, and he is also known for the Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm

Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm

The Kirkpatrick–Seidel algorithm, called by its authors "the ultimate planar convex hull algorithm" is an algorithm for computing the convex hull of a set of points in the plane, with O time complexity, where n is the number of input points and h is the number of points in the hull...

 for computing two-dimensional convex hull

Convex hull

In mathematics, the convex hull or convex envelope for a set of points X in a real vector space V is the minimal convex set containing X....

s.