CMX Lunch Seminar

What do cells, spermatozoa, snakes, stingrays, falling cats, astronauts, and platform divers have in common? They all effect motion---rotation and/or translation—through shape change and the resulting motion can be derived from the change of geometry with the aid of a variational principle. Remarkably, the resulting equations are first order in time rather than the usual second order equations of Newtonian dynamics. An algorithm that treats all of the these settings uniformly for purposes of animation is the subject of my talk in which we will see cats falling, snakes slithering about, artificial jellyfish swim, and Stanford bunnies dropped in water (and many more).

(Joint work with Oliver Gross, Yousuf Soliman, Marcel Padilla, Felix Knöppel, and Ulrich Pinkall ).