Visualization in Mathematics (Summer 2018)

This course is a BMS advanced course and the lectures will be in English. Please feel free to ask any questions in English or German.

News

• There will be no lecture on Friday 11 May.
• For the tutorial a laptop is required. To speed things up it is recommended to install (or at least download) the Houdini apprentice version before the first tutorial.
• The lecture starts on Monday 16 April. Depending on the number of students there will be offered one or two tutorials (website will be updated after the first lecture). The tutorial starts Tuesday 17 April.

Contents

Foundations for the visualization of curves and surfaces as well as for fluid simulation are treated. This includes certain topics of discrete differential geometry as e.g. discrete surfaces or discrete exterior calculus.

As visualization tool we will use Houdini. A free version can be downloaded from the here. The programming languages we use will be python and VEX.

The course is quite interdisciplinary, but needs in principle not much more then linear algebra and basic programming skills. Background in differential geometry is recommended.

Material

There is a course blog where also tutorials and homework exercises will be published.

For questions on Houdini and programming vex see the Houdini Tech Blog (an extended version of the DDG2016 blog). Other useful blogs are the following:

• Discrete Differential Geometry - Carnegie Mellon Spring 2016
• Mathematische Visualisierung - TU Berlin im Sommer 2013
• Discrete Differential Geometry - Caltech im Herbst 2011
• Mathematische Visualisierung - TU Berlin im Winter 2010

• Seifert, Threlfall: Lehrbuch der Topologie, Teubner 1934. [pdf]
• J. R. Munkres: Elements of Algebraic Topology, Perseus Books 1984.

Homework policy

There will be small programming projects every week. Depending on the number of students they should be turned in alone or by groups of two students.