Joined department: 1976

Before joining the Purdue faculty, Professor Hoffmann taught at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He has also been a visiting professor at the Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, West Germany (1980), and at Cornell University (1984-1986). His research focuses on geometric and solid modeling, its applications to manufacturing and science, and the simulation of physical systems. The research includes, in particular, research on geometric constraint solving and the semantics of generative, feature-based design. Professor Hoffmann is the author of Group-Theoretic Algorithms and Graph Isomorphism, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 136, Springer-Verlag and of Geometric and Solid Modeling: An Introduction, published by Morgan Kaufmann, Inc. Professor Hoffmann has received national media attention for his work simulating the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.