Mathematical Moments from the American Mathematical Society
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Moments program promotes appreciation and understanding of the role mathematics plays in science, nature, technology, and human culture. Listen to researchers talk about how they use math, from creating realistic animation to beating cancer.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jun 15, 2005 • 7min
Making Movies Come Alive
Many movie animation techniques are based on mathematics. Characters,
background, and motion are all created using software that combines pixels
into geometric shapes which are stored and manipulated using the mathematics
of computer graphics.
Software encodes features that are important to the eye, like position,
motion, color, and texture, into each pixel. The software uses vectors,
matrices, and polygonal approximations to curved surfaces to determine the
shade of each pixel. Each frame in a computer-generated film has over two
million pixels and can have over forty million polygons. The tremendous
number of calculations involved makes computers necessary, but without
mathematics the computers wouldn.t know what to calculate. Said one
animator, ". . . it.s all controlled by math . . . all those little X,Y.s, and Z.s that
you had in school - oh my gosh, suddenly they all apply."
For More Information:
Mathematics for Computer Graphics Applications, Michael E. Mortenson, 1999.
