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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
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| Geometric Modeling | ||
| The first recorded use of geometric figures to directly represent, or model, living beings. |
Certainly, Swift was not the first to think about living beings in geometric terms; Renaissance artists probably claim the prize there. But to actually build up an image of a person, say, with geometric figures alone?
| The knowledge I had in mathematics, gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed in the king’s kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his majesty’s table. |
| From Gulliver's Travels,
by Jonathan Swift. Published by Unknown in 1726 Additional resources -
|
If you are interested in the topic, you might want to check out the Online Geometric Modeling Notes, courtesy of our friends at UC Davis. There, you will learn about NURBS (non-uniform rational b-splines) and more.
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