Jeff Erickson's Research

My main research interests are computational geometry, computational topology, graph algorithms, and computer science education. Specific problem areas I have worked on include basic questions in combinatorial geometry and topology; analysis of realistic geometric inputs; geometric range searching; algorithms for continuously changing data; flows, cuts, shortest paths, and other structures in planar and surface graphs; and applications of geometry and topology to combinatorial optimization, computer graphics, robotics, spatial and temporal databases, and mesh generation. My computer science education research focuses on the development and assessment of auto-graded scaffolding exercises for algorithms and other theory topics, and more generally on best practices for teaching theoretical computer science effectively, equitably, and at scale.

Almost all of my algorithms research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, under a Mathematical Sciences Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, a CAREER award (CCF-0093348), and several other grants (DMR-0121695, CCF-0219594, DMS-0528086, CCF-0915519, OCI-0948393, CCF-1408763, and CCF-1725544). I was also supported by a Sloan Research Fellowship from 1999 to 2002. My computer science education research has been supported by multiple grants from the Strategic Instructional Innovations Program in the Grainger College of Engineering, with additional in-kind support from the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science, and more recently by the National Science Foundation (CCF-2434363).

My stuff

My local colleagues

My global colleagues


I came in late to Jeff Erickson's 8:30 pm talk on "Lower Bounds in Computational Geometry." Jeff's a CS grad student at Berkeley, and when I emailed Yarvin to ask if he knew this guy Jeff who did theoretical computational geometry, he responded, "Theoretical computational geometry makes me ill."
Thomas Colthurst, "What's a Nice Mathematician Like You Doing In a Place Like This?" (1993)