Helmut Pottmann

Biography:

Helmut Pottmann is a professor of applied geometry at TU Vienna. He has had faculty positions in the US and in Germany and at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he has been founding director of the Visual Computing Center. His research interests are in applied geometry, classical geometry and discrete differential geometry with a focus on applications in architecture, computational design and fabrication. His work in architectural geometry has also found its way into real projects such as the Eiffel Tower Pavilions and the Museum of Islamic Art in the Louvre in Paris, or the Yas Island Marina Hotel in Abu Dhabi. He is a Fellow of SIAM and received the Eurographics Outstanding Technical Contributions Award, the Bezier Award of the Solid Modeling Association and the John Gregory Award for fundamental contributions to geometric modeling.

Title:

Designing the visual appearance of polyhedral surfaces

Abstract

We present recent work on smoothness concepts for polyhedral surfaces and on the intentional deviation from smoothness. This research has been motivated by applications in computational design and fabrication and concerns (i) the visual regularity of polyhedral surfaces whose faces follow given patterns, (ii) the smoothest visual appearance of polyhedral surfaces and the closely related problem of (iii) finding material-minimizing forms and structures, and (iv) the design of triangle meshes with controlled roughness. The latter two applications are treated within so-called isotropic geometry, which is a structure-preserving simplification of Euclidean geometry that turns out to be useful in various applications. Common to all topics are optimization algorithms which are based on geometric insight and concepts from discrete differential geometry.