As seen in class, there are many different matrices with special properties that are named after people (Wikipedia list) such as the Vandermonde matrix. Another website has a relatively comprehensive list of special matrices and matrix properties. The ones described below are particularly well-known, have especially interesting properties, and can be handily generated […]

From Slashdot comes another story on ray-tracing. On the Intel Research blog, there is an interesting entry called “Real Time Ray-Tracing in Your Pocket”, talking about ray-tracing as a possibility for rendering graphics for games on mobile gaming platforms. Now this is surprising since we’ve only seen real-time ray-tracing implemented for Quake 3 […]

Our first project for the class involves producing ray-traced images through solving many root-finding problems. While ray tracing can produce realistic images involving lightning, shadows, and reflections, the main disadvantage of ray tracing is its slow performance, making it impossible to be rendered real-time. While the previous post by sambuu stated that through […]