Frontiers of Scientific Visualization

Exploring the art and science of making the unseen workings of nature Visible… Fluid flows, fractals, plant growth, genetic sequencing, the configuration of distant galaxies, virtual reality, artistic inspiration…these are a few of the many unseen phenomena, processes, events, and concepts that can be made visible through the power of modern computers—including personal computers. Frontiers of Scientific Visualization explores the many ways in which computers are now used as tools for simulation, art, and discovery. It presents the most important recent work of some of the best minds in computer-visualization research. It also puts forth a vision of the future in which current limitations on computer graphics dissolve, opening great new frontiers, vast new landscapes of knowledge, creativity, and even entertainment that, today, remain unseen. Many of the patterns provided in the book can be reproduced using a personal computer. Supplemented with a special 16-page insert of riveting color computer-generated illustrations, this clear and accessible text will be of equal interest to the scientist and the artist, the mathematician and the video technician, the educator, the student, and the general reader interested in computer graphics.

CLIFFORD A. PICKOVER is a research staff member at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is also the Associate Editor of Computers in Graphics, and an editorial board member of Computers in Physics and Speculations in Science & Technology. He is the author of Mazes for the Mind: Computers and the Unexpected and numerous other books on the blending of art and science. STUART K. TEWKSBURY (retired from AT&T Bell Laboratories) is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at West Virginia University. He has written or edited several books dealing with the general interplay between advances in technologies and opportunities for new architectures and applications, and is Editor of the Journal of Microelectronic System Integration.