Bob Geitz

Current classes:

· CS 357: Computer Graphics

· CS 275: Programming Abstractions

· FYSP 155: Information, Knowledge and the Internet

Past classes: At one time or another I have taught a lot of what there is in CS. In the 1980’s and 1990’s I regularly taught Compilers and all of our programming classes. Until we hired Alexa Sharp I taught our theory classes, including CS 383 (Theory of Computer Science) and CS 280 (Algorithms). I have taught Databases (CS 311) and even a course in Bioinformatics. What I most enjoy teaching are courses in Computer Graphics. We currently offer two of these in alternate years: CS 357, which is a course in graphics programming using OpenGL, and CS 359, which is a course in animation using Maya.

Bio: I was an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. I’m not sure why I ended up at Case, except that it wasn’t the University of Kansas where almost all of my high school classmates went. I took ridiculous course loads and ended up with separate degrees in Mathematics and Philosophy. This was right after the merger of Case Institute of Techology and Western Reserve University and I think I was the first student to get degrees from both. I went to the University of Illiniois for graduate school and more or less double-majored there as well. My Ph.D. was in a branch of Mathematics known as Functional Analysis; in my dissertation I solved a 30-year-old problem involving the integrability of functions with values in certain kinds of infinite dimensional vector spaces. At the same time I earned a Master’s degree in Statistics – the job market for pure mathematicians at the time was so bad that we were all encouraged to get a Master’s degree in an applied area. In 1980 Oberlin hired me for a temporary job in mathematics, largely because I could cover the statistics courses, and I never ended up leaving. I started teaching CS classes in the spring of 1982; a couple years after that Rich Salter and I broke off from the Math department to found a separate program in Computer Science. I’ve been in CS ever since.

I have done a fair number of things at Oberlin outside of computer science. I was an Associate Dean for 3 years, from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2002. For a semester in there (Fall 2000) I was the interim Dean of Arts and Sciences, but this was largely a placeholder position when the President was on leave and the real Dean was Interim President. My achievements were as Associate Dean for the curriculum. I started our First Year Seminar program and our Summer Registration program, and led the successful effort to get rid of our hippy-dippy grading system that was leftover from the 1960’s. I helped reform our class schedules to eliminate noon classes several days a week to free up time for community activities such as assemblies and faculty meetings. I proposed an overhaul of our neolithic credit system, which led to a lot of fireworks and is still waiting to be implemented.

I have chaired more faculty commitees than I care to count. Back in the 1980’s I chaired our Computer Committee when we took the entire senior administration (on a bus! The Merry Pranksters had nothing on us!) to Ann Arbor for a Show and Tell about how the University of Michigan used its computer network. This led directly to the installation of Oberlin’s campus network. I chaired this Computer Committee for a number of years as we transitioned from a focus on computers to a broader focun on educational technology. I chaired the Library Committee as we developed a policy on Information Literacy. I have served many terms on our Educational Plans and Policies Committee and our College Faculty Council. I have served on three Dean Search committees and chaired the most recent one.

At present I am Director of our First Year Seminar program and again a member of our Educational Plans and Policies Committee. I am also the Secretary-Treasurer of the campus chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

My research and teaching interests are concentrated on Computer Graphics. More than anything else, I am interested in algorithms that produce images from mathematical descriptions of a scene. I am a member of SIGGRAPH, the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics. SIGGRAPH has a wonderful conference every summer that I try to attend. This conference takes student volunteers – in return for about 30 hours of work over the course of a week, students can get free access to everything at the conference. This is not bad at all, considering that the registration fee for members is about $900. Quite a number of Oberlin students have done this. If you are interested, applications for volunteers are due in the early spring. Check the conference web site here for details.

Click here for a current CV.