Computer Animation in Mathematics, Science, and Art
Nelson Max · 2020
The film starts with a discussion with Steve Smale about the mathematical context of his theorem, and continues with a tour of the Charles Pugh’s models. The final 10 minutes consist of computer animation with a musical sound track, and this animated excerpt was shown at the conference. When the film was completed in 1976, it represented the state of the art in specifying, animating, and rendering smooth moving surfaces. It could be appreciated as art as well as mathematics. The essential core of ATOMLLL comes from the ATOMS program, written by Ken Knowlton and Lorinda Cherry at Bell Telephone Laboratories. They used a pseudo-perspective projection, in which the spheres project as circles, instead of the ellipses which would result from true perspective. They also approximated the elliptical projection of the intersection arc of two overlapping spheres by a circle. Thus the visible portion of an atom sphere is one or more regions bounded by line segments or circular arcs.