Born August 4, 1958, in Linz, Austria. 1977-1981 Diplom in Applied Mathematics at the Graz University of Technology, Austria. 1983 doctorate (supervisor Hermann Maurer) with a topic in formal languages, 1988 habilitation ("second doctorate") in Foundations of Computer Science, also in Graz.
1984 one-year post-doc at Rijks University Leiden, Netherlands, 1985 visiting professor at the University of Denver, Colorado, USA, for one semester. 1987-1996 Full Professor of Mathematics (theory of computation) at Free University of Berlin. 1994 four-month research stay at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley, California, USA. 1991-1996 chair of the graduate program "Algorithmic Discrete Mathematics" at Free University, Humboldt University, University of Technology, and the Konrad Zuse Center in Berlin. 2000-2005 Chair (at site Zurich) of the Berlin-Zurich Graduate Program in "Combinatorics, Geometry, and Computation" (CGC). 2016-2018 Head of Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich.
1992 Max Planck Prize with Micha Sharir (Tel Aviv University); 1995 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize; 1998 Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery; 2005 Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, Sektion Informationswissenschaften); 2006 Member of the Academia Europaea (Section Informatics); 2007 Member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse); 2014 Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Klasse).
Editorial/Advisory board member of Journal of Discrete and Computational Geometry (since 1988), SIAM Journal on Computing (since 2019), EATCS Monographs in Theoretical Computer Science (since 2012), EATCS Texts in Theoretical Computer Science (since 2012), and Journal for Universal Computer Science (since 1994); previously of ACM Transactions on Computation Theory (2007-2017), Mathematik Kompakt (Birkhäuser Verlag) (2007-2017), Computational Geometry-Theory and Applications (1991-2017), Fundamenta Informaticae (1997-2009), ORDER (1998-2008), and Journal of Symbolic Computation (1987-2003). Program committee chair for the 11th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (Vancouver, Canada, 1995), for the 27th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (Algorithms, Automata, Complexity and Games Track; Geneva, Switzerland, 2000), and for the 15th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (Design and Analysis Track; Eilat, Israel, 2007).
For a list of publications, see http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/emo/