Computational Geometry

Computational Geometry is the field within theoretical computer science that studies algorithms and data structures for geometric data. Its flagship conference is the International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG). Until 2014, SoCG (then called the Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry) was part of ACM. Based on the conclusive results of several discussions and votes in the community, it was decided to organize the conference independently starting from 2015. Since 2012, SoCG is part of CG Week, which also includes the CG Media Exposition (CG:ME), the Young Researchers Forum (CG:YRF), the CG Challenge (CG:SHOP), and various workshops. CG Week has been part of SafeToC since 2019 and established a Code of Conduct.

Other venues in the field are the European Workshop on Computational Geometry (EuroCG), the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG), and the Fall Workshop on Computational Geometry. The community publishes two open access journals: the Journal of Computational Geometry (JoCG) and Computing in Geometry and Topology (CGT).

We are renewing the Computational Geometry website. Not all content from the old pages has been ported over to the new website yet. You can find the old pages here.

The societies

There are two societies serving the Computational Geometry community. The Society for Computational Geometry was founded in 2019 in the USA to provide financial backing for organizing CG Week after it became independent from ACM. After extensive deliberation and votes in the community, the Computational Geometry Society (or CG Society) was founded in 2024 in the Netherlands to create a legal entity that can enforce the Code of Conduct and organize scientific events in a safe and inclusive manner. Starting in 2025, both CG Week and EuroCG will be organized as events of the CG Society.

About the logo

The Computational Geometry logo was adapted from a figure in a paper [1] by Joseph O'Rourke (the first program/conference chair of SoCG). The paper discusses the minimum convex cover problem, that is, the problem of finding a convex cover of an input polygon P with the minimum number of pieces. The figure establishes that even if P is rectilinear, a minimum convex cover for P may need to contain non-axis-aligned edges. Indeed, it can be shown that the eight axis-aligned rectangles in the figure are necessary in a minimum convex cover, and the only way to cover the remaining holes with a single piece is to use diagonal edges, as shown by the diamond.

P

[1] Joseph O'Rourke, The complexity of computing minimum convex covers for polygons. Proc. 20th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, 1982, pp. 75–84.

About this site

This site was started by Hervé Brönnimann. From 2007 to 2021 it has been maintained by Monique Teillaud and hosted by INRIA, first in Sophia Antipolis, then in Nancy. From 2021 to 2024 it has been maintained by Michael Hoffmann and hosted at ETH Zürich. Since 2024 it is maintained by the CG Society.