Ileana Streinu

Ileana Streinu is a Romanian-American computer scientist and mathematician, the Charles N. Clark Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at Smith College in Massachusetts.[1] She is known for her research in computational geometry, and in particular for her work on kinematics and structural rigidity.

Ileana Streinu
Alma mater	University of Bucharest Rutgers University
Known for	Work on kinematics, structural rigidity
Scientific career
Fields	Computer Science, Mathematics
Institutions	Smith College
Doctoral advisor	Solomon Marcus William L. Steiger

Biography

Streinu did her undergraduate studies at the University of Bucharest in Romania. She earned two doctorates in 1994, one in mathematics and computer science from the University of Bucharest under the supervision of Solomon Marcus and one in computer science from Rutgers University under the supervision of William L. Steiger.[1][2] She joined the Smith computer science department in 1994, was given a joint appointment in mathematics in 2005, and became the Charles N. Clark Professor in 2009.[1] She also holds an adjunct professorship in the computer science department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[3]

At Smith, Streinu is director of the Biomathematical Sciences Concentration[4][5] and has been the co-PI on a million-dollar grant shared between four schools to support this activity.[6]

Awards and honors

In 2006, Streinu won the Grigore Moisil Award of the Romanian Academy for her work with Ciprian Borcea using complex algebraic geometry to show that every minimally rigid graph with fixed edge lengths has at most 4ⁿ different embeddings into the Euclidean plane, where n denotes the number of distinct vertices of the graph.[7][8]

In 2010, Streinu won the David P. Robbins Prize of the American Mathematical Society for her combinatorial solution to the carpenter's rule problem. In this problem, one is given an arbitrary simple polygon with flexible vertices and rigid edges, and must show that it can be manipulated into a convex shape without ever introducing any self-crossings. Streinu's solution augments the input to form a pointed pseudotriangulation, removes one convex hull edge from this graph, and shows that this edge removal provides a single degree of freedom allowing the polygon to be made more convex one step at a time.[9][10][11]

In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[12]

Selected publications

• Borcea, Ciprian; Streinu, Ileana (2004), "The number of embeddings of minimally rigid graphs", Discrete and Computational Geometry, 31 (2): 287–303, arXiv:math/0207126, doi:10.1007/s00454-003-2902-0, MR 2060642.
• Streinu, Ileana (2005), "Pseudo-triangulations, rigidity and motion planning", Discrete and Computational Geometry, 34 (4): 587–635, doi:10.1007/s00454-005-1184-0, MR 2173930.

References

1. Curriculum vitae, retrieved 2012-03-06.
2. Ileana Streinu at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
3. UMass Department of Computer Science Faculty Directory, retrieved 2012-03-06.
4. Gibson, Elise (December 2011), Unlocking the Secrets of Life: Biology, math, technology converge in a hot new field, Alumnae Association of Smith College, retrieved 2012-03-06.
5. Smith Biomathematical Sciences Concentration, retrieved 2012-03-06.
6. Cummings, Kelsey (September 14, 2011), "National Science Foundation awards Smith $1 million biomathematics grant", The Sophian, archived from the original on September 10, 2012.
7. People News, Smith College, January 2, 2007, archived from the original on July 30, 2012, retrieved 2012-03-06.
8. Borcea & Streinu 2004.
9. "David P. Robbins Prize", January 2010 Prizes and Awards (PDF), American Mathematical Society, January 14, 2010, pp. 37–38.
10. Smith College Professor Recognized for Her Groundbreaking Mathematical Research, Smith College, January 14, 2010.
11. Streinu 2005.
12. List of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, retrieved 2013-08-05.

External links

• Web site at Smith College