Hamish Carr
Room: 2.04g Bragg
Phone: +44(0)113 343 7042
Email: h.carr@leeds.ac.uk
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. And then there are those of us who stumble from one disaster to another until things finally turn out OK.
I spent far too many years in university, ending up with five degrees, in Mathematics (B.Sc.), Law (J.D.) and Computer Science (B.C.Sc., M.Sc., Ph.D.). In the process, I once characterised my interests as "something theoretical combined with something visual", so it is no surprise that I do research into computer graphics, scientific visualisation and computational topology, always with a mixture of mathematics, algorithmic efficiency, visual presentation and domain utility. I prefer to work collaboratively with people in other disciplines, other institutions and other countries, because I find that interesting problems are easier to find when there's someone else trying to solve their own problem with computation.
The bulk of my research revolves around topological analysis of large scientific data sets, and is best understood not by looking at projects, which come and go, but at the themes that show up again and again. Some of these themes can be found on the pages on this site, which I will occasionally update.
Students interested in doing a PhD in the area of computational topology need to combine a strong mathematical aptitude with serious coding skill, since the target these days is to analyse an exabyte of data and extract an abstract description that can be used for analysis and display, preferably interactively. This (always) leads to algorithmic performance issues, questions of how to represent and display data, and how to exploit the big systems on which the data lives.
I also carry out the duties of Corporate Secretary for the Eurographics Association, and have recently (2020) been elected a Fellow of the Association.
