Louis Billera


Louis Joseph Billera is a Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.

Career

Billera completed his B.S. at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964. He earned his Ph.D. from the City University of New York in 1968, under the joint supervision of Moses Richardson and Michel Balinski.
Louis Billera served as the first Associate Director of the National Science Foundation Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University.
In 2010 he gave the invited lecture, "Flag enumeration in polytopes, Eulerian partially ordered sets and Coxeter groups" at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad.

Contributions

The common thread through much of his research is to study problems motivated by discrete and convex geometry. A sampling includes constructing polytopes to prove the sufficiency condition for the g-theorem, discovering fiber polytopes, and studying the space of phylogenetic trees.

Awards and honors

In 1994 Billera won the Fulkerson Prize for his paper, Homology of smooth splines. This prize is given every three years to the best paper in discrete mathematics.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected publications