Jim Blinn's Corner: Notation, Notation, Notation

by Jim Blinn

Overview

The third entry in the Jim Blinn's Corner series, this is, like the others, a handy compilation of selected installments of his influential column. But here, for the first time, you get the "Director's Cut" of the articles: revised, expanded, and enhanced versions of the originals. What's changed? Improved mathematical notation, more diagrams, new solutions. What remains the same? All the things you've come to rely on: straight answers, irreverent style, and innovative thinking. This is Jim Blinn at his best - now even better.

• Features 21 expanded and updated installments of "Jim Blinn's Corner," dating from 1995 to 2001, and never before published in book form
• Includes "deleted scenes"—tangential explorations that didn't make it into the original columns
• Details how Blinn represented planets in his famous JPL flyby animations
• Explores a wide variety of other topics, from the concrete to the theoretical: assembly language optimization for parallel processors, exotic usage of C++ template instantiation, algebraic geometry, a graphical notation for tensor contraction, and his hopes for a future world

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780080509600
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	07/16/2002
Series:	Jim Blinn's Corner Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	11 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

For over three decades, eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager flyby animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos. In addition, Blinn is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award as well as the SIGGRAPH Coons Award, and has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He currently works at Microsoft Research.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 How to Draw a Sphere Part I, Basic Math (January 1995)
Chapter 2 How to Draw a Sphere Part II, Coordinate Systems (March 1995)
Chapter 3 How to Draw a Sphere Part III, The Hyperbolic Horizon (September 1995)
Chapter 4 The Truth about Texture Mapping (March 1990)
Chapter 5 Consider the Lowly 2x2 Matrix (March 1996)
Chapter 6 Calculating Screen Coverage (May 1996)
Chapter 7 Fugue for MMX (March-April 1997)
Chapter 8 Floating Point Tricks (July-August 1997)
Chapter 9 A Ghost in a Snowstorm (January-February 1998)
Chapter 10 W Pleasure, W Fun (May-June 1998)
Chapter 11 Ten More Unsolved Problems in Computer Graphics (September-October 1998)
Chapter 12 The Cross Ratio (November-December 1998)
Chapter 13 Inferring Transforms (May-June1999)
Chapter 14 How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part I, Inflection Points (July-August 1999)
Chapter 15 How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part II, The "Same" Game (November-December 1999)
Chapter 16 How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part III, The Catalog (March-April 2000)
Chapter 17 A Bright, Shiny Future (January 2000)
Chapter 18 Optimizing C++ Vector Expressions (July-August 2000)
Chapter 19 Polynomial Discriminants Part I, Matrix Magic (November-December 2000)
Chapter 20 Polynomial Discriminants Part II, Tensor Diagrams (January-February 2001)
Chapter 21 Tensor Contraction in C++ (March-April 2001)