David Mount

David Mount is a professor at University of Maryland Department of Computer Science (College Park Campus) whose research is in Computational Geometry.

Mount received a B.S. in Computer Science at Purdue University in 1977 and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue University in 1983 under the advisement of Christoph Hoffmann.

He began teaching at the University of Maryland in 1984 and is Professor in the department of Computer Science there.

As a teacher, he has won the University of Maryland, College of Computer Mathematical and Physical Sciences Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2005 and 1997 as well as other teaching awards including the Hong Kong Science and Technology, School of Engineering Award for Teaching Excellence Appreciation in 2001.

Mounts's main area of research is Computational Geometry, which is the branch of algorithms devoted to solving problems of a geometric nature. This field includes problems from classic geometry, like the closest pair of points problem, as well as more recent applied problems, such as computer representation and modeling of curves and surfaces. In particular, Mount has worked on the k-means clustering problem, nearest neighbor search, and point location.

Mount has worked on developing practical algorithms for k-means clustering, a problem known to be NP-hard. The most common algorithm used is Lloyd's algorithm, which is heuristic in nature but performs well in practice. He and others later showed how kd-trees could be used to speed up Lloyd's algorithm. They have implemented this algorithm, along with some additional improvements, in the software library Kmeans.

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