Automatic generation of riemann surface meshes

  • Authors:
  • Matthias Nieser;Konstantin Poelke;Konrad Polthier

  • Affiliations:
  • Freie Universität Berlin, Germany;Freie Universität Berlin, Germany;Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • GMP'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Advances in Geometric Modeling and Processing
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Riemann surfaces naturally appear in the analysis of complex functions that are branched over the complex plane. However, they usually possess a complicated topology and are thus hard to understand. We present an algorithm for constructing Riemann surfaces as meshes in ${\mathbb R}^3$ from explicitly given branch points with corresponding branch indices. The constructed surfaces cover the complex plane by the canonical projection onto ${\mathbb R}^2$ and can therefore be considered as multivalued graphs over the plane – hence they provide a comprehensible visualization of the topological structure. Complex functions are elegantly visualized using domain coloring on a subset of ${\mathbb C}$. By applying domain coloring to the automatically constructed Riemann surface models, we generalize this approach to deal with functions which cannot be entirely visualized in the complex plane.