Raimund Seidel

Raimund G. Seidel is a German and Austrian theoretical computer scientist and an expert in computational geometry. Born in Graz, he studied at the Graz University of Technology, took a master's degree at the University of British Columbia in 1981 and a doctorate at Cornell University in 1987. After teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, he moved to Saarland University in 1994 and later became scientific director of the Leibniz Center for Informatics. He 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. With his student Cecilia Aragon he devised the treap data structure, and he is also known for the Kirkpatrick-Seidel algorithm for two-dimensional convex hulls.