David Eppstein
University of California, Irvine
From Information Visualization to Soap Bubbles
Abstract: We describe a form of network visualization inspired by the art of Mark Lombardi, in which networks are drawn with curved edges that are evenly spaced around each vertex. Some of these drawings greatly resemble two-dimensional soap bubble clusters, and we make this connection more precise by proving a mathematical characterization of the networks that can be represented by soap bubble clusters. The tools that we use to construct our network visualizations and to represent graphs as soap bubbles include circle packings, Möbius transformations, Voronoi diagrams, and three-dimensional hyperbolic geometry.
Biography: David Eppstein is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Irvine, and an ACM Fellow. He received his PhD in computer science from Columbia University in 1989, after majoring in mathematics at Stanford University, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1989 to 1990 before joining the UCI faculty. His research specialties include computational geometry, graph algorithms, and graph drawing.
