Jim Blinn's Corner - Notation, Notation, Notation

The third entry in the Jim Blinn's Corner series, this is, like the others, a handy compilation of selected installments of his influential column. But here, for the first time, you get the "Director's Cut" of the articles: revised, expanded, and enhanced versions of the originals. What's changed? Improved mathematical notation, more diagrams, new solutions. What remains the same? All the things you've come to rely on: straight answers, irreverent style, and innovative thinking. This is Jim Blinn at his best—now even better.

Highlights

• Features 21 expanded and updated installments of "Jim Blinn's Corner," dating from 1995 to 2001, and never before published in book form.
• Includes "deleted scenes"—tangential explorations that didn't make it into the original columns.
• Details how Blinn represented planets in his famous JPL flyby animations.
• Explores a wide variety of other topics, from the concrete to the theoretical: assembly language optimization for parallel processors, exotic usage of C++ template instantiation, algebraic geometry, a graphical notation for tensor contraction, and his hopes for a future world.

Author Biography: For over three decades, eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager flyby animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos. In addition, Blinn is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award as well as the SIGGRAPH Coons Award, and has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He currently works at Microsoft Research.

1. How to Draw a Sphere Part I, Basic Math: January 1995
2. How to Draw a Sphere Part II, Coordinate Systems: March 1995
3. How to Draw a Sphere Part III, The Hyperbolic Horizon: September 1995
4. The Truth about Texture Mapping: March 1990
5. Consider the Lowly 2x2 Matrix: March 1996
6. Calculating Screen Coverage: May 1996
7. Fugue for MMX: March-April 1997
8. Floating-Point Tricks: July-August 1997
9. A Ghost in a Snowstorm: January-February 1998
10. W Pleasure, W Fun: May-June 1998
11. Ten More Unsolved Problems in Computer Graphics: September-October 1998
12. The Cross Ratio: November-December 1998
13. Inferring Transforms: May-June 1999
14. How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part I, Inflection Points: July-August 1999
15. How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part II, The "Same" Game: November-December 1999
16. How Many Different Rational Parametric Cubic Curves Are There? Part III, The Catalog: March-April 2000
17. A Bright, Shiny Future: January 2000
18. Optimizing C++ Vector Expressions: July-August 2000
19. Polynomial Discriminants Part I, Matrix Magic: November-December 2000
20. Polynomial Discriminants Part II, Tensor Diagrams: January-February 2001
21. Tensor Contraction in C++: March-April 2001
22. Appendix