Computational Geometry And Its Applications

Computational Geometry and Its Applications

The International Workshop CG '88 on "Computational Geometry" was held at the University of Würzburg, FRG, March 24-25, 1988. As the interest in the fascinating field of Computational Geometry and its Applications has grown very quickly in recent years the organizers felt the need to have a workshop, where a suitable number of invited participants could concentrate their efforts in this field to cover a broad spectrum of topics and to communicate in a stimulating atmosphere. This workshop was attended by some fifty invited scientists. The scientific program consisted of 22 contributions, of which 18 papers with one additional paper (M. Reichling) are contained in the present volume. The contributions covered important areas not only of fundamental aspects of Computational Geometry but a lot of interesting and most promising applications: Algorithmic Aspects of Geometry, Arrangements, Nearest-Neighbor-Problems and Abstract Voronoi-Diagrams, Data Structures for Geometric Objects, Geo-Relational Algebra, Geometric Modeling, Clustering and Visualizing Geometric Objects, Finite Element Methods, Triangulating in Parallel, Animation and Ray Tracing, Robotics: Motion Planning, Collision Avoidance, Visibility, Smooth Surfaces, Basic Models of Geometric Computations, Automatizing Geometric Proofs and Constructions.

Computational Geometry and Its Applications

Computational Geometry

Computational geometry emerged from the field of algorithms design and anal ysis in the late 1970s. It has grown into a recognized discipline with its own journals, conferences, and a large community of active researchers. The suc cess of the field as a research discipline can on the one hand be explained from the beauty of the problems studied and the solutions obtained, and, on the other hand, by the many application domains--computer graphics, geographic in formation systems (GIS), robotics, and others-in which geometric algorithms play a fundamental role. For many geometric problems the early algorithmic solutions were either slow or difficult to understand and implement. In recent years a number of new algorithmic techniques have been developed that improved and simplified many of the previous approaches. In this textbook we have tried to make these modem algorithmic solutions accessible to a large audience. The book has been written as a textbook for a course in computational geometry, but it can also be used for self-study.