Jeff Erickson

Jeff Erickson is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a faculty member since 1998. His research interests lie at the intersection of algorithm design and discrete mathematics, especially for problems involving geometry, topology, graphs, and optimization. Jeff's father used to keep an “electric hammer” in his office. It was a regular hammer with a battery, an LED, and a toggle switch that he'd built into the handle. Whenever someone would ask how it worked, he would flip the switch, turning the LED on, and say “There. Now it's on.”