Researcher Creates Dazzling Animation through Mathematics

January 10, 2011

Eitan Grinspun, 34, director of Columbia University's Computer Graphics Group, has drawn the attention of big movie studios thanks to groundbreaking creativity in animation. And the key to the dazzling work is the relatively new field of discrete differential geometry.

He and his graduate students "find equations that describe lots of different kinds of physical systems," Grinspun explained, "the shape of a cable on a bridge, a spinning top, cilia."

Having helped Walt Disney Studios, Pixar, Weta Digital, and Adobe Systems solve graphics problems, Grinspun notes, "As long as you make pretty pictures, you get to keep learning all this math and physics."

The findings, moreover, have found applications outside Hollywood. Johns Hopkins Medical Center, for instance, uses the computer simulations to model techniques of laparoscopic surgery, so that interns and physicians don't have to learn how to do it on the real thing.

Source: New York Times (December 29, 2010)