Noel J Walkington, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Title: "Construction and Analysis of Unstructured Mesh Generation Algorithms"

Given a collection of points, edges, and faces, in a bounded region, the meshing problem is to construct the coarsest possible triangulation of the region from tetrahedra having bounded aspect ratio which "conforms" to the input. These requirements can lead to very complicated algorithms; so much so that it can be difficult to verify correctness. I will give an overview of the ideas and issues that arise when constructing algorithms to solve the meshing problem, and will indicate how the mesh generation problem touches on many areas of mathematics and computer science such as approximation and interpolation theory, computational geometry, sphere packing, graph theory, and algorithm design.