Eppstein received a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1984, and later an M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in computer science from Columbia University, after which he took a postdoctoral position at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. He joined the UC Irvine faculty in 1990, and was co-chair of the Computer Science Department there from 2002 to 2005. In 2014, he was named a Chancellor's Professor.
He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science in 1989, from Columbia University, advised by Zvi Galil. He has supervised thirteen PhD. students, all at University of California, Irvine.
Bern, Marshall; Eppstein, David (1992). "Mesh generation and optimal triangulation"(PDF). Technical Report CSL-92-1. Xerox PARC: 1–78. Republished in Du, D.-Z.; Hwang, F. K., eds. (1995). "Mesh Generation and Optimal Triangulation". Computing in Euclidean Geometry. Lecture Notes Series on Computing. Vol.4. World Scientific. pp.47–123. doi:10.1142/9789812831699_0003. ISBN978-981-02-1876-8.
Contributor in Algorithms and Computation, edited by Otfried Cheong. Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin, 2010. ISBN978-3-642-17516-9
Contributing speaker in Algorithms -- ESA 2004: 12th Annual European Symposium, Bergen, Norway, September 14-17, 2004, Proceedings. Susanne Albers, Ed. Springer, 2004. ISBN978-3-540-23025-0
Eppstein, D., Italiano, G. F., Tamassia, R., Tarjan, R. E., Westbrook, J., & Yung, M. (1990). "Maintenance of a minimum spanning forest in a dynamic planar graph." In Proceedings of the 1st Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, SODA 1990 (pp. 1-11). (Proceedings of the Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms). Association for Computing Machinery.
Books
Books as editor
Knowledge Spaces: Applications in Education, by Jean-Claude Falmagne, Dietrich Albert, David Eppstein, et al., Jul 3, 2013. Springer. ISBN978-3-6423-5329-1.
Graph Drawing: 17th International Symposium, GD 2009, Chicago, IL, USA, September 22-25, 2009. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5849) 2010th Edition, by David Eppstein (Editor), Emden R Gansner (Editor). Springer. ISBN978-3-642-11804-3.
123Hines, Michael (September 1, 2001). "Picture-perfect prints are possible". Business. Daily Press. Hampton, VA. p.G1, G7. Archived from the original on June 14, 2019. Retrieved September 9, 2019– via Newspapers.com. Eppstein is a computer science professor at the University of California, Irvine, and member of the rec.photo.digital online bulletin board of amateur digital photographers.