Konrad Polthier

Biography

Konrad Polthier is full professor of mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin and the DFG research center MATHEON, and member of the Berlin Mathematical School.


Konrad Polthier received his PhD from University of Bonn in 1994, and headed research groups at Technische Universität Berlin and Zuse Institute Berlin. His current research focuses on discrete differential geometry, applied geometry and mathematical visualization. Dr. Polthier co-edited several books on mathematical visualization, and co-produced educational video films. His recent video MESH (www.mesh-film.de, joint with Beau Janzen, Los Angeles) has received international awards including “Best Animation” at the New York International Independent Film Festival. Polthier served as paper co-chair on international conferences including ACM/Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing.


For more details see: http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/polthier

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Program : Branched Covering Surfaces – Geometry, Visualization and Applications

The talk introduces the concept of covering spaces for the study of surfaces and differential forms in shape modeling. A covering surface covers its base surface with multiple sheets, and connections between the sheets determine the topology of the covering. Covering surfaces naturally appear in complex analysis as correct domains of multi-valued complex functions such as Sqrt[z], or during the integration of vector fields as suitable domain of potential functions. These and many other properties make them an effective tool in surface modeling as it has been demonstrated in recent surface parametrization algorithms. Starting from a beginner’s perspective we will review the basic mathematical theory, provide novel visualization tools and hint at recent applications in surface modeling.