So apparently there’s a way to combine Prof James two favorite things: Graphics and really torturous numerical problems. In a full global illumination setting, where indirect lighting (light that bounces of a surface and lights another) is also computed, the goal of a renderer is to solve the rendering equation:

which is computing an integral over […]

The traditional way that shadows are computed in graphics is to create a mathematical model of a scene, and for every point draw a line to every light in the scene and figure out how many of those lines are obscured by another object. This gives excellent detail, but as you can imagine it can […]

Isaac Newton: The guy sat under trees, got hit by apples, and wore funny wigs. He also gets all the credit for way too many things. Isaac Newton published his method for finding roots of a polynomial in Method of Fluxions in 1736. It was the method we are all too familiar with: find a […]