[vtk-developers] Google Summer of Code students announced

[Bill Lorensen]

David,

Welcome. It will be great to see more computational chemistry support in
VTK. When I joined GE Research in 1978 my first projects involved
computational chemistry. I can't recall the names of the software, but they
were large Fortran programs that consumed many of the CPU cycles we had at
GE Research.

An early molecular visualization appeared on this GE recruiting brochure.I
wrote a Ray Tracer to visualize some GE polymers.
http://marchingcubes.org/index.php/Image:CRDRecruitingBrochure.png

I worked with a polymer chemist, John Bendler, and we had a pub in 1981.
Bendler, J. T., *W. E. Lorensen*, and R. J. Dowe, "Computer Modeling of
Polymer Conformations and Torsional Parameters," in American Physical
Society General Meeting, March 1981.

Part of my job was to interface with a number of molecular dynamics programs
and visualize the results on a Tektronix storage display.

So, there are some computational chemistry roots in the VTK community.

Looking forward to seeing some exciting work,

Bill

PS: There are also some google roots. I was doing a sabbatical in 1995-1996
in the Stanford Graphics Lab. Mark Levoy and Pat Hanrahan were my hosts. The
internet was starting to explode. I was a big user and posted many pages on
the Stanford site. I used the altavista search engine (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista). There were only a couple of search
engines then. I spent time with a young graduate student who told me about
his work on search engines. I advised him to pick another topic since
searching was a solved problem.

The student was Larry Page.

Moral: Sometimes experience is trumped by innovation.


On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 2:47 PM, David Lonie <loniedavid at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> I'm very excited to find out that my proposal was accepted! I'm a
> computational chemistry Ph.D. student at SUNY Buffalo and I will be
> working with Marcus to add native chemistry visualization tools to
> VTK. This will involve several new additions across the pipeline,
> mainly:
>
> * Sources that read the output of quantum mechanics calculations and
> other standard molecule formats
> * Filters to operate on electronic structure data, e.g. calculate
> electron density from molecular orbital data
> * Mappers to render molecules (ball and stick, wireframe, van der
> Waals spheres, etc) and electronic structure
>
> I look forward to working on VTK, and this summer should be very
> productive! :-)
>
> Dave
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