# David Eppstein

David Arthur Eppstein (born 1963) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. In 2011, he was named an ACM Fellow.

## Biography

Born in Windsor, England, in 1963, Eppstein received a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1984, and later an M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in computer science from Columbia University, after which he took a postdoctoral position at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1990, and was co-chair of the Computer Science Department there from 2002 to 2005. In 2014, he was named a Chancellor's Professor. In October 2017, Eppstein was one of 396 members elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Eppstein is an amateur digital photographer. He is also a Wikipedia editor and administrator with over 200,000 edits.

## Research interests

In computer science, Eppstein's research has included work on minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, dynamic graph data structures, graph coloring, graph drawing and geometric optimization. He has published also in application areas such as finite element meshing, which is used in engineering design, and in computational statistics, particularly in robust, multivariate, nonparametric statistics.
Eppstein served as the program chair for the theory track of the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry in 2001, the program chair of the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms in 2002, and the co-chair for the International Symposium on Graph Drawing in 2009.

## Selected publications

* Eppstein, David (1998). "Finding the k Shortest Paths" (PDF). SIAM Journal on Computing. 28 (2): 652–673. doi:10.1137/S0097539795290477.
** Eppstein, David (1994). "Finding the k shortest paths" (PDF). Proceedings 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science. pp. 154–165. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.39.3901. doi:10.1109/SFCS.1994.365697. ISBN 978-0-8186-6580-6. S2CID 3179241.
* Eppstein, D.; Galil, Z.; Italiano, G. F.; Nissenzweig, A. (1997). "Sparsification—a technique for speeding up dynamic graph algorithms". Journal of the ACM. 44 (5): 669–696. doi:10.1145/265910.265914.
* Amenta, N.; Bern, M.; Eppstein, D. (1998). "The Crust and the β-Skeleton: Combinatorial Curve Reconstruction" (PDF). Graphical Models and Image Processing. 60 (2): 125–135. doi:10.1006/gmip.1998.0465. S2CID 6301659. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-12-17.
* Bern, Marshall; Eppstein, David (1992). "Mesh generation and optimal triangulation" (PDF). Technical Report CSL-92-1. Xerox PARC: 1–78. Republished in Du, D.-Z.; Hwang, F. K., eds. (1995). "Mesh Generation and Optimal Triangulation". Computing in Euclidean Geometry. Lecture Notes Series on Computing. Vol. 4. World Scientific. pp. 47–123. doi:10.1142/9789812831699_0003. ISBN 978-981-02-1876-8.
* Eppstein, David; Lewis, Joel Brewster; Woodroofe, Russ (2025). "{Princ-wiki-a Mathematica}: Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics". Notices of the American Mathematical Society. 72 (1): 1. arXiv:2412.20419. doi:10.1090/noti3096. ISSN 0002-9920.

### Books

* Eppstein, D.; Falmagne, J.-Cl.; Ovchinnikov, S. (2008). Media Theory: Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics. Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-71697-6. ISBN 978-3-642-09083-7.
* Eppstein, D. (2018). Forbidden Configurations in Discrete Geometry. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108539180. ISBN 978-1-108-43913-8.