Talk:David Eppstein

message: My parents found this in their attic this Christmas: :File:CA Leg Res 234 1981.jpg. If it counts as a reliable source (I'm not sure) it might be of possible relevance to the (currently nonexistent) pre-college part of my bio. This is from the year before it became the United States Academic Decathlon. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:48, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: In case that was too cryptic: In 1980, while I was a senior at Palo Alto High School, I participated in the school's academic decathlon team. Our team won the highest level of the competition that year, the state championship.The linked file is a resolution of the California state legislature congratulating us. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:21, 14 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  A blast from the past 

message: Can someone please change "professor" to "Chancellor's Professor" in the second sentence of the lead? Source: http://www.ap.uci.edu/distinctions/chancprof.html 
Originally requested here 06:32, 12 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Johnuniq (talk) 08:09, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! —David Eppstein (talk) 16:18, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated job title 

message: Hello, new to Wikipedia so please excuse any misunderstanding of edit request protocol. I would like to propose making grammatical changes to the final line of the first section that currently reads "Especially,he improved algorithm for NP-hardness like traveling salesman problem.[3]" to improve readability. Currently, this line could use a space preceding "especially" and another space preceding "he". Generally speaking, this line may read more easily if combined with the last line to be "He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics, which includes significant work improving algorithms to solve problems of NP-hardness like the traveling salesman problem.[3]"  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sahandnayebaziz (talk • contribs) 19:49, 9 December 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I have to say (though there's no reason to take my opinion with any more weight than anyone else here) that I find that new sentence a little odd. I mean, I'm still pleased with that paper, but it's a primary source, it's not about TSP algorithms specifically (or improving algorithms in general), rather it's about a technique for algorithm analysis, and it's only somewhere around #30 on my list of most-cited papers rather than being closer to the top. Also if you're going to cite it you should cite the journal version not the preprint. If you're going to list research on exact algorithms for NP-hard problems (an area that I am indeed interested in) I have about four better-cited papers on graph coloring, as well as one that actually is on the TSP ("The traveling salesman problem for cubic graphs"). —David Eppstein (talk) 00:33, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor grammatical improvement 

message: Could someone wikilink the new article Giuseppe F. Italiano (created today by another user) to the occurrence of his name in the selected publication list here, please? Thanks. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:14, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. MathKeduor7 (talk) 06:03, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks again! —David Eppstein (talk) 06:10, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Authorlink 

message: Reading the archived discussion - I see a few people were rightfully doubting the Eppstein's credentials as great-enough to establish their notability. Vujkovica brdo did a good work by evaluating his k-shortest path routing algorithm. So, it's not so great as the author want to have it. We shall continue with the evaluation of his self-assessment the same way and completely. I'm certain that this biography should be deleted for we have thousands of the University professors around the globe with small and/or insignificant contributions to math and CS - academically at the similar hierarchical level as D. Eppstein.--94.68.78.151 (talk) 10:58, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Please read the previous section. Comments are welcome. GregorB (talk) 11:46, 31 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notability 

message: Research interests are not telling us anything about Eppstein's individual achievements validated academically. He earlier advertised some of his works on this talk page; I've managed to collect validations two of his Selected publications entries. Based on these validations, I believe, the colorless Research interests section should be replaced by some more meaningful title and content like the one we can see in the biography of Robert Tarjan ("Computer science career"), for example. 
===Advertised by Eppstein===
#Eppstein's most heavily cited paper, "Finding the k shortest paths" (J49), provides the first optimal solution to a widely studied problem: finding many short paths between two given nodes in a network. His solution takes constant time per path, improving previous solutions that were at least an order of magnitude slower. The papers that cite this one span a wide variety of application areas: quality of service routing in communication networks, hypothesis generation in natural language processing, biological sequence alignment, vehicle navigation, alternative strategy planning in computer chess, metabolic pathway reconstruction, failure analysis, peptide sequencing, and chemical kinetics.
#Another influential and heavily-cited paper within the review period, "The crust and the beta-skeleton: combinatorial curve reconstruction"  (J46, with Marshall Bern and Nina Amenta) considers "connect-the-dots" like problems in which a curve or surface must be reconstructed accurately from scattered sample points. The paper introduced the idea that a correct reconstruction could be guaranteed if the sample density is proportional to some measure of local feature size, a common theme of subsequent work in the area.
===Reality===
:1. From "Eppstein's algorithm provides the best results" is visible that the paper "Finding the k shortest paths":     a) it solves the easier part of the problem,   b) cannot generate k simple shortest paths and     c) outdated in practice
:2. For "The crust and the beta-skeleton: combinatorial curve reconstruction" Eppstein is a third author. From the article it's not possible to separate Eppstein's work from the other two authors. N. Amenta has six articles handling the curve reconstruction, M. Bern two, Eppsetin one. A sufficient validation of N. Amenta et al. algorithm for this purpose can be extracted from these three articles:
::Christopher Gold: An Algorithmic Approach to a Marine GIS, January 2000
::Amenta et al. (1998) showed that if a curve or boundary is sufficiently well sampled then the boundary may be extracted from the unordered points as the set of DT edges whose circumcircles do not contain part of the skeleton. (Sufficiently well sampled was shown to be a function of the distance from the boundary to the MAT. It is usually easily achievable except at sharp corners.)
::Siu-Wing Cheng, Stefan Funke, Mordecai Golin, Piyush Kumar, Sheung-Hung Poon, Edgar Ramos: Curve Reconstruction from Noisy Samples, August 2003
::Amenta et al. [2] obtained the first results in this problem. They proposed a 2D crust algorithm whose output is provably faithful if the input satisfies the \epsilon-sampling condition for any \epsilon < 0.252. For each point x on F, the local feature size f(x) at x is defined as the distance from x to the medial axis of F. For 0 < \epsilon < 1, a set S of samples is an \epsilon-sampling of F if for any point x ∈ F, there exists a sample s ∈ S such that \parallels − x\parallel ≤ \epsilon · f(x) [2]. The algorithm by Amenta et al. invokes the computation of a Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation twice. Gold and Snoeyink [10] presented a simpler algorithm that invokes the computation of Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation only once. 
::Ulrich Bauer, Konrad Polthier: Generating Parametric Models of Tubes from Laser Scans, October, 2009
::Another simple but provably correct method, which also works for curves in higher dimensions, is the NN-Crust algorithm, proposed by Dey and Kumar [10]. This is the algorithm we used in our implementation for reconstructing a polygonal curve from a point cloud.
::Bottom line: The Amenta et al. algorithm has several deficiencies.
::#it's two dimensional
::#sampling fails at sharp corners
::#unnecessarily invokes the computation of a Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation twice
::#outdated in theory and in practice
--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 17:19, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Research interests vs.Academically validated works 

message: :1. From "Eppstein's algorithm provides the best results" is visible that the paper "Finding the k shortest paths":     a) it solves the easier part of the problem,   b) cannot generate k simple shortest paths and     c) outdated in practice
:2. For "The crust and the beta-skeleton: combinatorial curve reconstruction" Eppstein is a third author. From the article it's not possible to separate Eppstein's work from the other two authors. N. Amenta has six articles handling the curve reconstruction, M. Bern two, Eppsetin one. A sufficient validation of N. Amenta et al. algorithm for this purpose can be extracted from these three articles:
::Christopher Gold: An Algorithmic Approach to a Marine GIS, January 2000
::Amenta et al. (1998) showed that if a curve or boundary is sufficiently well sampled then the boundary may be extracted from the unordered points as the set of DT edges whose circumcircles do not contain part of the skeleton. (Sufficiently well sampled was shown to be a function of the distance from the boundary to the MAT. It is usually easily achievable except at sharp corners.)
::Siu-Wing Cheng, Stefan Funke, Mordecai Golin, Piyush Kumar, Sheung-Hung Poon, Edgar Ramos: Curve Reconstruction from Noisy Samples, August 2003
::Amenta et al. [2] obtained the first results in this problem. They proposed a 2D crust algorithm whose output is provably faithful if the input satisfies the \epsilon-sampling condition for any \epsilon < 0.252. For each point x on F, the local feature size f(x) at x is defined as the distance from x to the medial axis of F. For 0 < \epsilon < 1, a set S of samples is an \epsilon-sampling of F if for any point x ∈ F, there exists a sample s ∈ S such that \parallels − x\parallel ≤ \epsilon · f(x) [2]. The algorithm by Amenta et al. invokes the computation of a Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation twice. Gold and Snoeyink [10] presented a simpler algorithm that invokes the computation of Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation only once. 
::Ulrich Bauer, Konrad Polthier: Generating Parametric Models of Tubes from Laser Scans, October, 2009
::Another simple but provably correct method, which also works for curves in higher dimensions, is the NN-Crust algorithm, proposed by Dey and Kumar [10]. This is the algorithm we used in our implementation for reconstructing a polygonal curve from a point cloud.
::Bottom line: The Amenta et al. algorithm has several deficiencies.
::#it's two dimensional
::#sampling fails at sharp corners
::#unnecessarily invokes the computation of a Voronoi diagram or Delaunay triangulation twice
::#outdated in theory and in practice
--Vujkovica brdo (talk) 17:19, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Reality

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: The Microsoft Academic Search article says that the project retired in 2012, and the Microsoft Academic Search link on this article appears to be a dead link. Can it be either removed, or replaced by my more-up-to-date Google Scholar profile (use  to obtain ), please? 
Also, while we're discussing external links, the "Geometry Junkyard" one is also not one I've been maintaining for many years now, and is only one of many links available under my home page. It also probably doesn't deserve a separate entry here. And the Mathematics Genealogy Project link is also available in the Authority Control line, so it is somewhat redundant in the external links. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:19, 1 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. I don't see why  should be used in the first two external links, but I left them. Johnuniq (talk) 01:27, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  and   would make more sense, but whatever. As longer as they're reasonably well-formatted and apropos, I don't mind. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:29, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I tried that as it seems better. Please let me know if there is a parameter problem. Johnuniq (talk) 03:29, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dead external link 

message: Please add that I have been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and add :Category:Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Sources:  (primary, but reliably published and independent of me), , and  (both from my employer). Those sources might also be helpful as references for some of my research interests, which are currently not well sourced. I would also suggest removing the graduate fellowship and young investigator awards as being more minor than we usually mention in articles about academics, and maybe also replacing the mesh generation survey paper in the selected publication list by the corresponding research paper, "Provably good mesh generation" (FOCS 1990 and JCSS 1994), but of course that's up to you. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:03, 27 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I have added the election (supported by link 1) and the category.  The rest is probably worth doing but needs thought so I'll do it later unless anyone else gets in first. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 17:07, 28 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:  All implemented except substitution of the research paper. Please provide a DOI, and I'll substitute it in the list of publications. Regards,  Spintendo  ᔦᔭ  21:23, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! It's  —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  AAAS 

message: This biography has some auto biographical elements. Self-sourced in many parts. He is known for his work in computational geometry, graph algorithms, and recreational mathematics. Known for his work in recreational mathematics? Where it comes from? The Eppstein algorithm link leads us to the k-shortest path routing where we have only a general description of his algorithm.
I'd ask for references verifying his work in recreational mathematics and for deletion of the link.--Dishonesty Test (talk) 08:38, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I might be wrong, but I suspect Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Vujkovica brdo is relevant for this editor. I might also be wrong, but I suspect a big part of the supposed incompleteness of the K shortest path routing article is that Dishonesty Test just removed a big chunk of it. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:46, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  I might be wrong, but... 

message: Half of the topics that the current version of the article lists as "computational geometry" are not geometry at all. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:36, 29 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Huh. You're right. Maybe "topics related to graph theory" would be better. "Geometric optimization" (which should probably point somewhere like here instead) really sticks out, too. XOR'easter (talk) 19:26, 4 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inaccuracy in research topics 

message: My job title is now "Distinguished Professor" rather than "Chancellor's Professor": see . Can someone please adjust this in the article? Thanks.
(Don't ask me why the linked page pulled a 16-years-out-of-date self-portrait from my personal web page, without asking my preference or permission, rather than commissioning the same kind of professional-level photo the other distinguished professors have. Maybe because lockdown? Also don't ask why "Distinguished Professor" is a step up from "Chancellor's Professor" when you might expect from the names that it's the other way around. You're all lucky we didn't add another separate "UCI Distinguished Professor" title at a different level from "Distinguished Professor" as we were talking about doing a couple of years ago.) —David Eppstein (talk) 06:45, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks! —David Eppstein (talk) 07:40, 26 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Change of job title 

message: Someone might want to fix the "Mesh generation and optimal triangulation" listing in the selected publications section, newly mangled by User:Citation bot, and/or file a complaint on the bot's talk page about how badly it mangled the citation. (Hints: the tech report version is not the version that was published with a doi in a book series, and the version in the second edition of the book is not the one that was republished in the first edition of the book.) Alternatively, if it were up to me (which it isn't), I'd seriously consider citing research publications and not survey papers in this section; the research paper that goes with this survey is "Provably good mesh generation". —David Eppstein (talk) 22:57, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mangled citation 

message: I see that over the years there has been content added about his English birth and New Zealand family background, which was cut (perhaps more than once) for being unimportant. He is now simply described in the lede as "American". But we still describe him in the infobox as born in England, and categorize him as a "British emigrant to the United States". This breaches policy: the infobox and categories should summarize/reflect verified information in the body of the article (MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE; WP:CATV). So either these details should be included, or they should be omitted, not the current half-and-half. I don't much care either way. You decide. GrindtXX (talk) 01:11, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I have added a source for his birth in Windsor, Berkshire to the body. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 09:31, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  English birth 

message: I don't know what "Fellows of the Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science" is supposed to mean. It should be just "fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science". Can someone fix, please? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:27, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Of the council"? 

message: David Eppstein, what's your birthday? 176.88.28.90 (talk) 08:45, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, see WP:BLPPRIVACY. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:43, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Semi-protected edit request on 6 September 2021 

message: In general, I've tended to leave content inclusion decisions in this article to others, per WP:AUTOBIOGRAPHY. And I do think that, if you're going to keep this list short, it's a good idea to only pick one paper from sets of closely related papers (the three most prominent of which are "Mesh generation and optimal triangulation"/"Provably good mesh generation", "Subgraph isomorphism in planar graphs and related problems"/"Diameter and treewidth in minor-closed graph families", and "Sparsification"/"Dynamic graph algorithms"/"Separator based sparsification"). But, if you insist on including the survey paper rather than the research paper from the mesh generation pair, would it be too much to ask for it to be cited correctly? (1) The primary version is the one in Computing in Euclidean Geometry; the tech report version listed first is just a preprint, and is no more the right version to cite than the preliminary versions of the other three papers. (2) It was not "republished" in Computing in Euclidean Geometry; it was published there. (3)  "Lecture Notes Series on Computing" is the name of the series the book was published in; it has nothing to do with the tech report version. (4) The link given for it appears to be a pirated version and fails WP:ELNEVER. I don't particularly mind my papers being pirated but that's no excuse for violating Wikipedia's linking standards. The archived deadlink for the crust paper also appears to be a pirate link. There appears to be a non-pirated version of the crust paper at http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~amenta/pubs/crust.ps.gz (sorry, old file format) and of "Mesh generation and optimal triangulation" (but the version from the 1995 second edition of the book) at https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pubs/BerEpp-CEG-95.pdf, or it would be there if the web server were up. Also, while I'm making suggestions here: I recently created an article on the journal Graphical Models and Image Processing (or rather a redirect there and an article on its current name), so it could be linked from the crust paper. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:16, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: PS I have my own list of selected publications at https://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/pubs/selected.html (and have had it there for a long time, but recently went through it and updated it). It's probably too long to be in balance with the rest of the article, and to some extent it's a list of publications I think should be paid attention to rather than the ones that anyone else thinks are important, but it still might be useful input if anyone feels like re-thinking the selection here. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:26, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Selected publications 

message: While you guys are edit-warring over whether I should be listed in :Category:Wikipedia people (please stop and discuss instead of continuing to edit-war), isn't anyone wondering why an article-space page is listed in the user-space category :Category:American Wikipedians or why  is putting this article into the bogus redlinked category :Category:Articles with google identifiers?
I have no opinion on the :Category:Wikipedia people question, by the way. But much as the edit-warring amuses me, you should stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:18, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Happy to leave this argument to people who care, so have unwatched the page. Enjoy. Jonathan A Jones (talk) 11:53, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: But with a parting revert.  Having examined the category, and its remarkably unhelpful definition note, it seems to me that DE belongs in it quite as much as many there, several of whom are not even admins. No, I did not notice the user category issue, let alone the authority control issue, & I won't mess with them.  But if anyone thinks DE does not belong in :Category:Wikipedia people , let's hear why. Johnbod (talk) 16:25, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

text: In case you need more sourcing regarding my contributions to Wikipedia, see: https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/careers/030822/what-s-with-wikipedia-and-women —David Eppstein (talk) 17:30, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categories 

message: My editing was vandalized by a  David Eppstein, so I looked it up online found this, I think for the balance of Wikipedia content, this should be included
https://www.quora.com/Is-David-Eppstein-useful-for-Wikipedia
Aggressive editing style is not professional  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.30.131.151 (talk) 06:54, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: In case anyone wants context, my best guess (from what I've been editing most recently) is that this is connected to Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jenia Meng. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:24, 28 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: criticism section

message: Symposium on Discrete Algorithms has its own article and should be linked from this one, where it is mentioned in the second paragraph of "Research interests". More substantially, I was also program chair for the Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory in 2018 (see e.g. DBLP for a source). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:02, 22 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Partly done:  I added the link, but I think listing the position as program chair would be a little excessive. The article already contains a lot of statements supported by WP:PRIMARY sources; if this position was noteworthy, there should be reporting on it in secondary sources. Actualcpscm (talk) 13:46, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: DBLP is a secondary source. That's why I listed it in the request. It seems very strange to list all but one of the program chair positions for notable conferences, and snub one, for reasons that apply to all of them. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:04, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Program chairing