Office
529 Soda Hall
Computer Science Division
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, California 94720-1776
(510) 642-3936 [(510) NICE ZEN]
Office hours (510 or 529 Soda Hall)
Mondays, 5:10-6:00 pm
Fridays, 5:10-6:00 pm
and by appointment.
Outside of office hours or lectures,
your best shot at contacting me is to try my office
between 3 pm and midnight on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday,
in person or by phone.
Those are the ideal times to ask me about
research, coursework, or anything else.
Sadly, Soda Hall and its fifth floor are locked after 6:30,
so call my office if you want to visit and don't have a keycard.
While you're by, ask me to make a pot of tea.
I get teas from Upton Tea Imports,
a first-rate importer in Massachusetts,
and I enjoy introducing people to the good stuff.
Mornings I sleep. Attempts to phone me then are futile.
TRIANGLE.
A production-quality C program for
two-dimensional constrained Delaunay triangulation and quality mesh generation.
See the
Triangle page
to obtain the source code and for hypertext instructions.
I expect to release its three-dimensional successor, Star,
in the near future.
The algorithms behind Triangle and Star are discussed in my dissertation
and in several other papers on my
Papers
page.
STELLAR.
A C program for aggressively improving the quality of tetrahedral meshes,
making them suitable for finite element analysis.
Stellar routinely improves meshes so that the smallest dihedral angle is larger
than 30 degrees and the largest dihedral angle is smaller than 140 degrees.
See the
Stellar page
to obtain the source code, hypertext instructions, and
publications describing its algorithms.
EXACT ARITHMETIC AND ROBUST
GEOMETRIC PREDICATES.
I've written a set of fast routines for exact floating-point
addition and multiplication, which I've used to create
fast correct geometric predicates, namely the two- and three-dimensional
orientation and incircle tests.
These predicates are used to make the Delaunay triangulation routines
in Triangle and Star robust against roundoff error.
See my
Robust Predicates page for more information, for papers,
or to obtain the C source code.
RESEARCH OVERVIEW.
Here's a self-contained summary of some of my research.
This is the fastest way to learn a bit about my work.
THREE SINS OF AUTHORS IN
COMPUTER SCIENCE AND MATH.
A short crotchety essay that will improve your technical writing,
or annoy you trying.
You won't find these sins decried in the usual books of writing advice.
While you're at it, you might be interested in my (less snarky) advice on
Giving an Academic
Talk.
Projects
BERKELEY COMPUTER ANIMATION
& MODELING GROUP.
We develop numerical and geometric methods for physically-based animation,
especially for objects and materials with dynamically changing geometry.
Dynamic geometry is important for modeling fluids, viscoplastic materials,
and events such as surgery, car crashes, and explosions.
QUAKE.
The Quake Project is a multidisciplinary Grand Challenge Application
Group studying ground motion in large basins during strong earthquakes,
with the goal of characterizing the seismic response of the Los Angeles basin.
We created some of the largest unstructured finite element
simulations ever performed.
CS 274: COMPUTATIONAL GEOMETRY(Spring 2019,
Spring 2017,
Spring 2015,
Spring 2013,
Autumn 2009,
Autumn 2006,
Spring 2005,
Spring 2003).
Geometric algorithms, analyses, and applications.
Polygons, polytopes, triangulations, planar and spatial subdivisions,
convex hulls, halfspace intersections, Voronoi diagrams,
Delaunay triangulations, arrangements of lines and hyperplanes.
Geometric queries (databases, point location), binary space partitions,
robot motion planning, cartography, solid modeling,
small-dimensional linear programming, and more.
MARTIN ISENBURG, 1972–2021,
In Memoriam.
Martin was a Post-Doctoral Scholar under my supervision
from the summer of 2005 to the summer of 2007.
He developed a software suite called
the LAStools
for fast streaming computation of geographical information (including
Delaunay triangulations) on huge data sets,
which he subsequently promoted through his personal company,
rapidlasso GmbH.
I wrote an extended obituary for him after
his sad early death.
RAVIKRISHNA KOLLURI
in December 2005 completed his Ph.D. on surface reconstruction algorithms,
including
spectral
surface reconstruction, scan registration,
moving least squares interpolation for generating implicit surfaces
(which won the Best Student Paper Award
at the 2005 Symposium on Discrete Algorithms),
and the very cool
power
crust.
Read his dissertation,
From
Range Images to 3D Models.
He now works at Google.
Meanwhile, a new picture is emerging in which the
“diseases of civilization&rdquo—heart disease, diabetes,
overweight,
tooth
decay,
and perhaps even Alzheimer's disease and many cancers—are symptoms
of a metabolic dysfunction caused by both the wrong foods and deficiencies
of the right ones.
The most likely culprits appear to be metabolism-disrupting
lectins in
grains
(especially wheat, other
gluten
grains, and soy);
fructose
(often in the form of high fructose corn syrup, from grain);
omega-6
fats and
lectins
in vegetable seed oils (also from grain);
iron;
and deficiencies of
Vitamin D3,
Vitamin K2 MK-4,
copper,
omega-3
fats,
magnesium,
and
niacin.
It is not yet clear whether carbohydrates in large amounts are inherently
harmful, though they are clearly harmful to many people who have broken their
metabolisms with grain products.
(If there is a safe carbohydrate source, it is probably root vegetables.)
Consumption of grains, vegetable seed oils, fructose, and carbohydrates
has risen sharply, and intake of Vitamin K2 MK-4 has dropped,
in response to official demonization of dietary saturated fat,
causing increases of type 2 diabetes and obesity.
The American Medical Association, the
American
Heart Association, the
American Diabetes
Association,
and many other authorities have blood on their hands, and
they will continue to lead us lambs into the slaughterhouse of grain
poisoning until the culture of nutritional research is reformed.
While I've been aware of these facts for some time, I now have a rigorous
account to direct people to. Gary Taubes, in
Good
Calories, Bad Calories—his new
exposé of what the scientific data really reveal—writes,
“The institutionalized vigilance,
‘this unending exchange of critical judgment,’
is nowhere to be found in the study of nutrition, chronic disease,
and obesity, and it hasn't been for decades. For this reason, it is difficult
to use the term ‘scientist’ to describe those individuals who
work in these disciplines. …
The result is an enormous enterprise dedicated in
theory to determining the relationship between diet, obesity, and disease,
while dedicated in practice to convincing everyone involved, and the lay
public, most of all, that the answers are already known and always have
been—an enterprise, in other words, that purports to be a science and yet
functions like a religion.” Harsh words, but words entirely justified by
the data in the research literature—though the papers that present those
data often go through great contortions to
explain them away and
defend the dogma.
I call upon the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to fund large randomized
controlled trials that test the hypothesis that grain-derived carbohydrates
are central in the etiology of coronary heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
Over the past two decades, the NIH has dedicated its largest nutritional grants
to unsuccessfully confirming the “fat is bad” hypothesis, while
neglecting all competing hypotheses. We are all suffering for this
misallocation of resources.
“[Wisdom] is earned through disgrace, through painful realization of
the inadequacy of your personal world view.”
—
Nat Hillard
“In my psychedelic, hazy-vision state, where I reach the ultimate
heightened awareness of the beer-buzz, I realise the true meaning of exams:
that professors are evil, torture-loving beings, and that we cannot blame them
for their shortcomings.”
—
Rob Chung
“We need a more lasting form of negative feedback than just
paper rejections.”
— Jonathan Hardwick
on research
Jonathan Shewchuk
The conjugate gradient method
