Guest Editor's Introduction to Special Issue on Computational Geometry

The idea for a Special Issue of Transactions on Graphics devoted to Computational Geometry arose from conversations between myself, Leo Guibas, and Jorge Nievergelt at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the spring of 1983. We felt that it was time to attempt to bridge the historical divide between the two schools of computational geometry that had emerged during the 1970's, and that TOG was an appropriate forum. The call for papers produced more contributions than we had expected, many of high quality, and some lengthy. It was therefore decided to publish two full Special Issues (April 1984 and this one) and include two papers in the next regular issue of TOG {January 1985). We would like to thank contributors and referees for their help and valued advice. The earliest reference to computational geometry that I have been able to discover appears to be Minsky and Papert 's 1969 book "Perceptrons," subtitled "An Introduction to Computational Geometry." [1] Unfortunately the term is not defined, nor is it mentioned in the index, or as far as I recall, elsewhere in the book, and we are left to draw our own conclusions as to what the authors intended the term to mean! Independently, while at Cambridge University, I had decided that using computers to perform geometric calculations required a fresh approach to geometry and I defined computational geometry in 1971 as