A Concise Introduction to Scientific Visualization: Past, Present, and Future

✍ Scribed by Brad Eric Hollister, Alex Pang

• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 112
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Scientific visualization has always been an integral part of discovery, starting first with simplified drawings of the pre-Enlightenment and progressing to present day. Mathematical formalism often supersedes visual methods, but their use is at the core of the mental process. As historical examples, a spatial description of flow led to electromagnetic theory, and without visualization of crystals, structural chemistry would not exist. With the advent of computer graphics technology, visualization has become a driving force in modern computing. 

A Concise Introduction to Scientific Visualization – Past, Present, and Future serves as a primer to visualization without assuming prior knowledge. It discusses both the history of visualization in scientific endeavour, and how scientific visualization is currently shaping the progress of science as a multi-disciplinary domain. 

 

✦ Table of Contents

Preface
Contents
Early Visual Models
Prehistory
Parietal Art
The Near East
Proto-Writing
Pictographs
Counting and Numerals
Greece
The Beginnings of Geometry
Visual Methodology
Lo Shu Squares and Visual Methods
Conics
Optics
Greek Astronomy and The Antikythera Mechanism
Summary
References
Illustration and Analysis
Middle Ages
Printing and Treatises
Scientific Illustration
Illustration of Fluids
Analytic Geometry
Descriptive Geometry
Mechanized Computation
Summary
References
Scientific Visualization in the Nineteenth Century
The Electromagnetic Field
Faraday's Visual Methods
Vector Analysis
Force Parallelograms, Quaternions, and the Gibbs-Heaviside System
Crystallography
Visualization in the Birth of Structural Chemistry
Programmable Mechanical Computation
Summary
References
A Convergence with Computer Science
Von Neumann's Architecture
Improved Numerical Calculation
Computer Graphics and Utah
Raster Pipeline
Silicon Graphics
The Geometry Engine
Modern-Day Graphics Systems
Scientific Visualization Algorithms
The Visualization Pipeline
Field Data
Scalar Fields
Vector Fields
Tensor Fields
Summary
References
Recent Developments
Biological and Chemical Processes
Machine Learning in Scientific Visualization
Principle Component Analysis
Clustering
Uncertainty Visualization
Probability Density Functions
Ensemble Data
Probabilistic Contours
Statistical Medical Data
Uncertain Flow Data
Conferences
Summary
References
The Future
Fidelity, Speed, and Content
Big Data
Distributed Collaboration
Scientific Visualization for Education
Scientific Visualization and Artificial Intelligence
Deep Learning
Bi-Directional Scattering Distribution Functions Using ANNs
Summary
References
Index