Ding-Zhu Du


Ding-Zhu Du is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. He is known for his research on the Euclidean minimum Steiner trees, including an attempted proof of Gilbert–Pollak conjecture on the Steiner ratio, and the existence of a polynomial-time heuristic with a performance ratio bigger than the Steiner ratio.

Education

Ding-Zhu Du received his M.Sc in Operations Research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1985. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics with research area in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1984.

Career

Early in his career he published two claimed results on the Euclidean minimum Steiner trees, a proof of the Gilbert–Pollak conjecture on the Steiner ratio, and the existence of a polynomial-time heuristic with a performance ratio bigger than the Steiner ratio. The proof of the Gilbert–Pollak conjecture was later found to have gaps, leaving the problem unsolved.
He was Program Director for CISE/CCF, National Science Foundation, USA, 2002-2005, Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Minnesota, 1991-2005. and Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986-1987.
He has been active in research on Design and Analysis of Approximation Algorithm for 30 years. And over these years he has published 177 Journal articles, 60 conference and workshop papers, 22 editorship, 9 reference works and 11 informal publications.

Books published

Awards and honors

Personal life

Du is married to Weili Wu, also a professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Dallas. They met at the University of Minnesota, when Wu was a student there and Du was a professor.