Edward Reingold

2016 Distinguished Academic Achievement Alumni Award

A highly regarded computer science teacher, mentor, and administrator, Edward Reingold has a PhD from Cornell University and spent the majority of his career (30+ years) as a CS @ ILLINOIS faculty member, where he made significant research and education contributions to data structures and analysis of algorithms.

His work has impacted computer science theory and has applications to many disciplines. His seminal paper on graph drawing via force-directed placement is used today to draw networks throughout the sciences and social sciences.

In addition to his research, Reingold has written several textbooks, including Combinatorial Algorithms, which was translated into Japanese, Russian and Polish, and Calendrical Calculations—soon to be in a fourth edition—the definitive reference for computer implementations of calendars. He wrote the calendar/diary portions of GNU Emacs and contributed to other Emacs packages, as well.

After retiring from Illinois, Reingold became CS department head at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), serving for six years before returning to the IIT faculty as a professor of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics. He is an ACM Fellow.

In 2014, Reingold was featured in a story by the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) about Operation Match, the world’s first computer dating program. He met his wife Ruth through Operation Match in the spring of 1966. At the time of her death last April, they had been married more than 47 years; they have four daughters and 12 grandchildren.