Herbert Edelsbrunner - Böcker

The book combines topics in mathematics (geometry and topology), computer science (algorithms), and engineering (mesh generation). The motivation for these topics is the difficulty, both conceptually and in the technical execution, of combining elements of combinatorial and of numerical algorithms. Mesh generation is a topic where a meaningful combination of these different approaches to problem solving is inevitable. The book develops methods from both areas that are amenable to combination, and explains breakthrough solutions to meshing that fit into this category. This book emphasizes topics that are elementary, attractive, useful, interesting, and lend themselves to teaching, making it an ideal graduate text for courses on mesh generation.

The book combines topics in mathematics (geometry and topology), computer science (algorithms), and engineering (mesh generation). The motivation for these topics is the difficulty, both conceptually and in the technical execution, of combining elements of combinatorial and of numerical algorithms. Mesh generation is a topic where a meaningful combination of these different approaches to problem solving is inevitable. The book develops methods from both areas that are amenable to combination, and explains breakthrough solutions to meshing that fit into this category. This book emphasizes topics that are elementary, attractive, useful, interesting, and lend themselves to teaching, making it an ideal graduate text for courses on mesh generation.

In the first part the book covers Voronoi diagrams and Delaunay triangulations, then it presents the theory of alpha complexes which play a crucial role in biology. The central part of the book is the homology theory and their computation, including the theory of persistence which is indispensable for applications, e.g.

This book offers a modern approach to computational geo-metry, an area thatstudies the computational complexity ofgeometric problems. Combinatorial investigations play animportant role in this study.

Computational geometry as an area of research in its own right emerged in the early seventies of this century. Right from the beginning, it was obvious that strong connections of various kinds exist to questions studied in the considerably older field of combinatorial geometry. For example, the combinatorial structure of a geometric problem usually decides which algorithmic method solves the problem most efficiently. Furthermore, the analysis of an algorithm often requires a great deal of combinatorial knowledge. As it turns out, however, the connection between the two research areas commonly referred to as computa­ tional geometry and combinatorial geometry is not as lop-sided as it appears. Indeed, the interest in computational issues in geometry gives a new and con­ structive direction to the combinatorial study of geometry. It is the intention of this book to demonstrate that computational and com­ binatorial investigations in geometry are doomed to profit from each other. To reach this goal, I designed this book to consist of three parts, acorn binatorial part, a computational part, and one that presents applications of the results of the first two parts. The choice of the topics covered in this book was guided by my attempt to describe the most fundamental algorithms in computational geometry that have an interesting combinatorial structure. In this early stage geometric transforms played an important role as they reveal connections between seemingly unrelated problems and thus help to structure the field.