Triangle Everywhere

About the Lecture

Computational Geometry is a field that uses the computer to solve massive geometric problems. These problems are often easy to visualize but impossible for humans to solve by themselves for large sets of data. The speaker in collaboration with Francis Sullivan at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed an efficient computational method to triangulate a set of points, that is, to fill out the space that these points span with triangles (in two dimensions) or tetrahedra (in three dimensions). The result has been useful in a variety of ways. In this talk, this triangulation method will be presented along with useful applications. In the second part of this talk a method for triangulation on a parallel computer will be presented. Parallel computers are machines made up of several smaller computers (in our case, thousands) wired together to solve a problem as a group. The speaker, Isabel Beichl, is a mathematician at NIST and works on scientific computing problems. She has her doctorate in mathematics from Cornell University and has previously worked on UNIX development at Bell laboratories.