AMS 545/ CSE 555 Course Material, Spring 2011

Joe Mitchell, Math Tower 1-109, 632-8366

The course meets Mon/Wed, 5:20--6:40pm in Harriman 108.


Office Hours for Joe: Tues (1:00-2:00), Wed (3:00-4:00), or by appointment, or drop by whenever (don't be shy!)
Teaching Assistant: Mayank Goswami (mayank.isi "AT" gmail DOT com). Office hours: Monday/Wednesday 2:00-3:00 in Math 2-109.

Announcements:

5/16/11: solutions to hw7 (problem 2) and quiz4 (problem 3) have been slightly updated.
Finals Week: I expect to be in my office: Mon 10am-2:30pm, Tues 1pm-5pm (approx), Wed 9am-12:00. I will be able to give back quiz4 during these times. I will make hw6 and hw7 papers available on an envelope on my door, so you can pick up at any time (Math 1-109).
The Final Exam is during Period 4: 5:15-7:45pm, Wednesday, May 18, in Javits 105.
Note that there are TWO practice finals posted below. The second one has solutions on Blackboard.

Quiz stats: (quizes are equally weighted, even though they have different total points each)
Quiz1 (out of 15 points): mean=11.43, median=11.5, 1st quartile=10, 3rd quartile=14;
Quiz2 (out of 25 points): mean=20.68, median=22, 1st quartile=17.75, 3rd quartile=25;
Quiz3 (out of 20 points): mean=14.9, median=15, 1st quartile=12, 3rd quartile=18;
Quiz4 (out of 17 points): mean=15.2, median=16, 1st quartile=14, 3rd quartile=17.

Main Course Information

Course Information (AMS 545/CSE 555, Spring 2011) This is the main course information sheet with details about exams, homeworks, grading, etc. Homework solutions will be posted on Blackboard.

Lecture Topics, giving brief notes of what is covered each class


Lots of information about what computational geometry is all about can be found at Jeff Erickson's Geometry Page.

Homeworks and Other Handouts


PROJECTS. A growing list of possible (optional) projects.
Some SAMPLE PROJECTS, done by previous students: randomized incremental CH (java); point location search in trapezoidal diagram (Visual C++).

The introductory class on Monday, January 31 ( Powerpoint slides are available) will give an overview of what computational geometry is and what types of problems we study in the course. I will include some demos, which are applets linked from the slides and linked below.

Homework 1, due Wednesday, Feb 16 in class.
Solution notes for HW1 (posted after due date): See Blackboard course documents.
Notes on Melkman's Algorithm
An example of the Bentley-Ottmann sweep
A description of Melkman's algorithm (the applet link no longer works)
link to T. Chan's paper on output sensitive convex hull computation. See also the convex hull algorithms notes of Robert Pless (based on David Mount's course notes on CG)

Homework 2 (updated 2/17/11), due Wednesday, March 2 in class.
Solution notes for HW2 (posted after due date): See Blackboard course documents.

Homework 3 due Wednesday, March 16 in class.
Solution notes posted after due date on Blackboard course documents.
Polygon1.fig, Polygon1.jpg, Polygon2.fig , Polygon2.jpg,

Homework 4 due Wednesday, March 30 in class.
Solution notes posted after due date on Blackboard course documents.

An example of the construction of the Kirkpatrick hierarchy

VoroGlide, Voronoi diagram demo
Cool demo of Fortune's sweep algorithm for Voronoi diagrams
Handout on Voronoi/Delaunay notes

Homework 5 due Wednesday, April 13 in class.
Solution notes posted after due date on Blackboard course documents.

Homework 6 due Monday, May 2 in class.
Solution notes posted after due date on Blackboard course documents.

Homework 7 due Monday, May 9 in class.
Solution notes (updated 5/16/11) posted on Blackboard course documents.

Practice final exam; solutions

Another Practice final exam Solution is posted on Blackboard.

Miscellaneous Links of Relevance:

  • Required textbook, by de Berg, Cheong, van Kreveld, and Overmars (3rd Edition).
  • Recommended textbook by O'Rourke, entitled "Computational Geometry in C, 2nd Edition"
  • Computational Geometry at Stony Brook
  • Tom Fevens course notes, slides and links, following our text
  • CG Tutorial, with applets
  • Geometry software, part of geometryalgorithms.com
  • Godfried Toussaint's CG page where Godfried keeps many useful links to cool stuff in CG
  • Graph drawing slides, Dynamic CG slides, Brown University
  • Convex hull algorithm applets, with cool Java applets for Graham's scan, Jarvis' march, and Quick hull
  • A description of Melkman's algorithm (the applet link no longer works)
  • link to T. Chan's paper on output sensitive convex hull computation. See also the convex hull algorithms notes of Robert Pless (based on
  • David Mount's course notes on CG
  • On the Hertel-Mehlhorn algorithm to compute a decomposition of a simple polygon into convex polygons
  • shortest path in simple polygon, with horizontal trapezoidization, triangulation, "random" simple (monotone) polygon; by Josh Tyler
  • Search the geom.bib, Barcelona search engine
  • The Open Problems Project (TOPP), with J. O'Rourke and E. Demaine
  • NYU Geometry Seminars
  • Computational Geometry on the WWW, Maintained by Guilherme Albuquerque Pinto
  • David Eppstein's Geometry in Action
  • Jeff Erickson's Geometry Page
  • David Eppstein's General Geometric References
  • Mesh Generation Pages
  • Voronoi.com, page of Chris Gold
  • CGAL, the Computational Geometry Algorithms Library
  • Directory of Computational Geometry Software
  • QuickCD, Stony Brook's fast collision detection code (my work with J. Klosowski, M. Held)