This text takes a practical, step-by-step approach to algebraic curves and surface interpolation motivated by the understanding of the many practical applications in engineering analysis, approximation, and curve-plotting problems. Because of its usefulness for computing, the algebraic approach is the main theme, but a brief discussion of the synthetic approach is also presented as a way of gaining additional insight before proceeding with the algebraic manipulation. Professionals, students, and researchers in applied mathematics, solid modeling, graphics, robotics, and engineering design and analysis will find this a useful reference.

Requires only a basic knowledge of mathematics and is geared toward the general educated specialists. Includes a gallery of color images and Mathematica code listings.

"Curves and Surfaces in Geometric Modeling: Theory and Algorithms offers a theoretically unifying understanding of polynomial curves and surfaces as well as an effective approach to implementation that you can apply to your own work as a graduate student, scientist, or practitioner." "The focus here is on blossoming - the process of converting a polynomial to its polar form - as a natural, purely geometric explanation of the behavior of curves and surfaces. This insight is important for more than just its theoretical elegance - the author demonstrates the value of blossoming as a practical algorithmic tool for generating and manipulating curves and surfaces that meet many different criteria. You'll learn to use this and other related techniques drawn from affine geometry for computing and adjusting control points, deriving the continuity conditions for splines, creating subdivision surfaces, and more." "It will be an essential acquisition for readers in many different areas, including computer graphics and animation, robotics, virtual reality, geometric modeling and design, medical imaging, computer vision, and motion planning."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines have become the de facto standard in CAD/CAM and computer graphics. This well-known book covers NURBS from their geometric beginnings to their industrial applications. The second edition incorporates new results and a chapter on Pythagorean curves, a development that shows promise in applications such as NC machining

In this book, Miranda takes the approach that algebraic curves are best encountered for the first time over the complex numbers, where the reader's classical intuition about surfaces, integration, and other concepts can be brought into play. Therefore, many examples of algebraic curves are presented in the first chapters. In this way, the book begins as a primer on Riemann surfaces, with complex charts and meromorphic functions taking centre stage. But the main examples come fromprojective curves, and slowly but surely the text moves toward the algebraic category. Proofs of the Riemann-Roch and Serre Dualtiy Theorems are presented in an algebraic manner, via an adaptation of the adelic proof, expressed completely in terms of solving a Mittag-Leffler problem. Sheaves andcohomology are introduced as a unifying device in the later chapters, so that their utility and naturalness are immediately obvious. Requiring a background of one term of complex variable theory and a year of abstract algebra, this is an excellent graduate textbook for a second-term course in complex variables or a year-long course in algebraic geometry.

Preface -- Chapter 1 P. B̌ezier: How a Simple System Was Born -- Chapter 2 Introductory Material -- Chapter 3 Linear Interpolation -- Chapter 4 The de Casteljau Algorithm -- Chapter 5 The Bernstein Form of a B̌ezier Curve -- Chapter 6 B̌ezier Curve Topics -- Chapter 7 Polynomial Curve Constructions -- Chapter 8 B-Spline Curves -- Chapter 9 Constructing Spline Curves -- Chapter 10 W. Boehm: Differential Geometry I -- Chapter 11 Geometric Continuity -- Chapter 12 ConicSections -- Chapter 13 Rational B̌ezier and B-Spline Curves -- Chapter 14 Tensor Product Patches -- Chapter 15 Constructing Polynomial Patches -- Chapter 16 Composite Surfaces -- Chapter 17 B̌ezier Triangles -- Chapter 18 Practical Aspects of B̌ezier Triangles -- Chapter 19 W. Boehm: Differential Geometry II -- Chapter 20 GeometricContinuityforSurfaces -- Chapter 21 Surfaces with Arbitrary Topology -- Chapter 22 Coons Patches -- Chapter 23 Shape -- Chapter 24 Evaluation of Some Methods -- Appendix A Quick Reference of Curve ...

1 Aims and Features of This Book The contents of t. his book were originally planned t. o be included in a book en titled Geometric lIIodeling and CAD/CAM to be written by M. Hosaka and F. Kimura, but since the draft. of my part of the book was finished much earlier than Kimura's, we decided to publish this part separately at first. In it, geometrically oriented basic methods and tools used for analysis and synthesis of curves and surfaces used in CAD/CAM, various expressions and manipulations of free-form surface patches and their connection, interference as well as their qualit. y eval uation are treated. They are important elements and procedures of geometric models. And construction and utilization of geometric models which include free-form surfaces are explained in the application examples, in which the meth ods and the techniques described in this book were used. In the succeeding book which Kimura is to write, advanced topics such as data structures of geometric models, non-manifold models, geometric inference as well as tolerance problems and product models, process planning and so on are to be included. Conse quently, the title of this book is changed to Modeling of Curves and Surfaces in CAD/CAM. Features of this book are the following. Though there are excellent text books in the same field such as G. Farin's Curves and Surfaces for CAD /CAM[l] and C. M.

Computer disk contains: "data sets, as well as all of the C routines found in the book."