For the benefit of those who couldn't make the first class, here is what
will pass for a course outline.  I'll be putting some material online through
the web at a later date.  Stay tuned.

The course is being co-taught by James Stewart and me.  Until (if?) we find
a better room, lectures are being held in University College, Room 57, at
10:00 on Thursdays.  You are welcome to attend even if you are not taking
the course for credit.

Those who do want a credit should tell me so fairly soon.  I have got a
preliminary list and will solicit updates.  Depending on enrollment, the
final grade will be a function of one or two variables: either a course
project together with a talk, or just the course project.

I will be covering the basics of geometric modelling.  I'll be focusing on
objects that are expressible as a weighted sum of "basis" functions.  This
is a remarkably rich class of shapes, and includes the polynomial splines, 
and implicit/algebraic functions.

My first lecture argued for the use of polynomial forms and we saw that
convenient representations can be easily derived.  I went through a lot of
material very quickly; once we get to deeper material, I'll slow down.  In
the next lecture, I'll be developing a bit of the theory of B-splines,
introduce non-uniform B-splines, and talk about a lovely theory called
"blossoming".

Subsequent lectures will include a discussion of implicit objects, free-form
deformations, superquadrics, particle systems and anything else I can squeeze
in given the restrictions of time and student presentations.  If I have time,
I'll try to talk a bit about wavelet representations.  Otherwise that would
make an excellent topic for a student presentation.

James will be introducing the fundamentals of computational geometry
relevant to computer graphics, including convex hulls, voronoi diagrams
and delaunay triangulations, 2-D and 3-D visibility including binary space
partitioning.  The use of randomisation will be a theme of this presentation.
James will give you more detail on this material as the time for his
lectures draws near.

The talk you give should be of about 1/2 hour in length, and should cover
recent material relevant to our course.  We're talking here about reading
a few relevant papers and presenting it to your peers.

The course project can be either practical or theoretical, but obviously
must be fairly substantial.  Talk to one of us about it.

Here are a few references that you might want to look up for my part of the
course:

* some chapters from my elementary, about-to-be-published book, which I can
  reproduce for interested people for the incredibly low cost of proof
  reading it for me.  Let me know.

* Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes, Computer Graphics, Principles and
  Practice, Addison Wesley

* Watt and Watt, Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Addison Wesley

* Hoschek and Lasser, Computer-Aided Geometric Design, A.K. Peters (I've been
  reading a lot of this one lately).

* Bartels, Beatty, Barsky (aka The Killer B's), An Introduction to Splines
  for Use in Computer Graphics and Geometric Modeling, Morgan Kaufmann.

* Farin, Curves and Surfaces for Computer-Aided Geometric Design,
  2nd/3rd Edition, Academic Press.

* Prenter, Splines and Variational Methods, John Wiley and Sons.

I love the Prenter book, but it's a little distant from our material.
I mostly follow Farin and Hoschek&Lasser for the splines work.  I'll
work from the published literature for the rest.