[vtk-developers] Additional math functionality

[Philippe P. Pebay]

Following the request I made (ca. a month ago) to add alebraic solvers and combinatorial utilities
into vtkMath, and the brief discussion that followed, I made some additions that can be summarized
as follows:

1. several combinatorics functions (factorials, binomials, etc.)
2. a real root finder for real, arbitrary order, univariate polynomials
    based on Lin-Bairstow's method.
3. a real root finder for real, cubic, univariate polynomials
    based on Tartaglia-Cardan's method. For a summary of the differences
    with SolveCubic is provided in the header file documentation.
4. an additional interface for SolveQuadratic (to pass pointers instead of
    coefficients).
5. useful constants: DBL_EPSILON if not provided by the system (to filter
    numerical noise), sqrt(3), 1/3.

NB: testing will be added shortly.

Now I'm ready to be blamed ;-)

Cheers
Philippe-

Will Schroeder wrote:
 > There has been a request by several VTK developers to move some math functionality into VTK (mainly polynomial root 
solvers). We are talking several thousand lines of code. Of course we could just cram it into vtkMath, take the ITK 
approach and include a math library, or create new math classes, etc. At this point I am looking for opinions.
 >
 > Will
-- 
Philippe P. Pebay                |      pppebay at ca.sandia.gov
Sandia National Laboratories     |     Phone: +1 925 294 2024
PO Box 969, MS 9051              |     Cell : +1 925 784 3255
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