Meet the Fellow: Professor Sang Won Bae
Higher-Order Color Voronoi Diagrams: Structures and Algorithms
Professor Sang Won Bae from Kyonggi University, South Korea, delves into the fascinating intersection of pure mathematics and computer science through discrete and computational geometry. His Senior Fellowship in Bayreuth revisits a concept first touched upon by René Descartes in 1644: Voronoi diagrams, thus remaining a vibrant area of study today.
Prof. Dr. Sang Won Bae and Prof. Dr. Stefan Leible, President of the University of Bayreuth
If you had to explain the research project of your Fellowship to the person you met in the elevator, how would you describe it?
Sang Won Bae:The research field, called discrete and computational geometry, is between pure mathematics and computer science. Meaningful geometric structures, made of simple building blocks such as points, lines, circles, and shapes in 2D, 3D or sometimes more than 4D, are studied. Outcomes of such researches are typically structural and combinatorial properties of target structures and efficient algorithms to compute them.These results are often based on software systems, including those in databases, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence.The research project of the Fellowship is a typical research topic in discrete and computational geometry, in which generalized Voronoi diagrams are dealt with. Voronoi diagrams are one of the most important geometric structures studied in the field, for examples, it had appeared even in Principia Philosophiae by Descartes, published in 1644!
Was there a special moment in your life that made you decide for your research focus?
SB:Voronoi diagrams are easy to draw. They are often found beautiful in the nature. When I first encountered Voronoi diagrams in the graduate school, I was just attracted. I don't know the exact reason. Anyway, I started to think "I want to know this more and more." And it led me to the current research.
What was your personal experience during your stay?
SB: I was quite surprised by wild animals in the city of Bayreuth. I stayed in a house near St. Georgen. There, I have seen hares, hedgehogs, and also fireflies. It was a very special experience to see fireflies with my wife and my son, because it's really hard to see them in Korea, even in rural regions.
What were your expectations when you applied for the Fellowship?
SB: First, my host, Prof. Dr. Christian Knauer, is a renowned expert in the field. We had two or three common publications before. So, I expected a very active collaboration between us. Second, the problems of my research project were known to many others, while they've remained unsolved for at least 7 or 8 years. I wanted to have some clues on the subject.
If you could choose a famous researcher or scientist to have dinner with, who would it be?
SB: I would like to meet Paul Erdős, a Hungarian mathematician, considered a founder of the research field, discrete geometry. This is a dream that cannot come true, as he has passed away in 1996. If I had dinner with him, we must have proved an interesting theorem.
The Fellow
Prof. Bae received PhD in 2008 at Department of Computer Science, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea. At present, he is working as a professor at Kyonggi University, Suwon, South Korea. Research interests include algorithms design and analysis in computational geometry, discrete and combinatorial geometry, graph theory, and their algorithmic applications to other disciplines.