Visualization in Mathematics (Summer 2016)

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

• Soon we will need SciPy. If not yet installed on your machine, please install it. Here is a test file.
• No tutorial on 31 May: The homework can be handed in by mail or in the tutorial on 2 June.
• Some examples on the blog use a small complex algebra library. It can be found here.
• There is no tutorial on the 5 May (holiday): Please submit your homework (hip-file containing the network and the rendered picture) by mail.
• Please install the apprentice version of Houdini before the first lecture.
• The lecture starts Monday 18 April, the tutorials on 19/21 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. A background in differential geometry is certainly helpful and recommended.

Material

The DDG2016-blog:

• There is a blog for this course, which will be frequently updated with the lectures.

Blogs of previous semesters and other useful links:

• 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

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.