UCI Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science David Eppstein’s latest book, Forbidden Patterns in Discrete Geometry (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is now available. “Many of the famous problems in discrete geometry share deep connections,” explains Eppstein, “as I discovered when I started to write a survey paper on this material and it got out of hand. The result is this book.”

Eppstein wrote the book to be accessible to both mathematicians and computer scientists, noting that it “integrates the mathematics of points in the plane with computational problems of pattern matching in sets of points.” As highlighted by the publisher, the book has minimal prerequisites and plenty of figures, so it should be of interest to undergraduate students as well as researchers. Eppstein introduces most of the topics with a related puzzle or brain-teaser, with the subjects covered ranging from collinearity and convexity to robust statistical estimation and network visualization.

According to Jozsef Solymosi, a math professor at the University of British Columbia, “Eppstein’s journey through various problems of pointset configurations offers a new view of the subject even to experts of the field.” He recommends the book to “everyone who likes geometry and computer science.”

— Shani Murray