Franz-Erich Wolter

He currently heads the Institute of Man-Machine Communication and is the Dean of Studies in Computer Science at Leibniz University Hannover.

Wolter's early contributions were in the area of Differential Geometry dealing with the Cut Locus characterizing it as the closure of a set, where the shortest geodesics starting from a point (or a general source) set intersect or equivalently where the distance function is not directionally differentiable implying that a complete Riemannian manifold M must be diffeomorphic to R^n if there is a point p on M s.t.

[5][6] In 1992, essentially a specialisation of the latter works lead to his paper presenting a mathematical foundation of the medial axis of solid objects in Euclidean space.

[13] Wolter's early works on computing Riemannian Laplace Beltrami spectra for surfaces and images[14] lead to a patent application in (2005)[15] for a method using those spectra as Shape DNA[16] for recognizing and retrieving surfaces, solids and images from data repositories.

[21][22][23] Under Wolter's guidance research on the haptic and tactile renderer of HAPTEX resulted in two doctoral theses of his students published as monographies by Springer, cf.

After his Ph.D., before switching to an academic career, he had been working as software and development engineer in the electrical industry for AEG.

Wolter's article on the computation of geodesic Voronoi diagrams on parametric surfaces received the best paper award of CGI 1997.