Ileana Streinu
Research Interests

"The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to get sharper"
Eden Phillpots

My area of research is Combinatorial and Computational Geometry. I enjoy working on both theoretical and applied problems.

I have used tools from Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Rigidity Theory, Oriented Matroids, Linear Programming and Computational Algebraic Geometry, and worked on problems with applications in Computer Graphics, Graph Drawing, Robotics, Statistics, Data Visualization and, more recently, Computational Structural Biology (Protein flexibility, structure, folding, alignment - i.e. the problems that exhibit geometrical structure).


Note: The list below has not been updated in a long while (at least 7 years), but geometry still lies at the heart of all my investigations, theoretical or applied. More recent interests include mathematical and algorithmic problems for: In addition, my group works on mathematical and algorithmic questions emerging from molecular biology, where we view protein backbones as 3D revolute-jointed robot arms, molecules as mecahnical structures with fixed length bonds and bond angles, and crystalline materials as periodic mechanical frameworks made from rigid parts. Our work, complemented by the development of useful software, asks questions of accuracy and efficiency for molecular models and computational methods for their static and dynamic analysis.

Research directions and problems of interest include:

Long time ago (before 1989) I was interested in Programming Languages and Compilers (esp. LISP, on which I wrote a book), Formal Languages, Recursive Function Theory and Logic, and was particularly fond of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and undecidability results.

My co-authors.


Ileana Streinu