Jonathan Shewchuk (University of California, Berkeley, U.S.A.)
Many tasks in scientific computing and computer graphics require surface
meshes
or volume meshes composed of high-quality triangles or tetrahedra.
Some mesh generation algorithms use the mathematical properties of Delaunay
triangulations to offer guarantees on the quality of the meshes they
produce.
I discuss mesh generation algorithms that take advantage of two variants of
the
Delaunay triangulation to resolve specific problems. Three-dimensional
domains
whose polygonal boundaries meet at small angles are particularly difficult
to
mesh with high-quality tetrahedra; weighted Delaunay triangulations provide
a way to ensure that a mesh will conform to the shape of the domain.
Curved surfaces embedded in three dimensions are difficult to mesh because
of
the difficulty of ensuring that a piecewise linear mesh will be a
topologically
and geometrically accurate representation of a surface; restricted Delaunay
triangulations, coupled with a theory of surface sampling, provide a way to
guarantee this accuracy along with a guarantee of high-quality triangles.
The theory and algorithms in this talk will appear in a forthcoming book,
"Delaunay Mesh Generation", by Siu-Wing Cheng, Tamal Dey, and myself.