Malcolm Sabin

Personal Details

Malcolm runs his own company, Numerical Geometry Ltd., which sells consultancy in geometric computing to the CAD CAM and GIS software suppliers.

Malcolm was a Royal Society Industrial Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University (DAMTP) from September 1st 1995 to August 31st 1998. Since then he has continued his association with the NA group, coming into the department about once a week.

He is a member of the college of peers for the CDP group of EPSRC

Research

His main interests are in the mathematics of curves and surfaces, but also in the other issues important in geometric computing, and in the problems of making robust and reliable software generally.

He has written various pieces of software which have been widely used `in anger', in the fields of surface description (NMG), Numerical Control part-programming (Profiledata), NC control (KV), finite element mesh generation (FAM), and even parallel finite element analysis (FAMcalcP).

His early work on surface description resulted in a number of internal reports from British Aircraft Corporation. These were widely circulated at the time, and are now being retypeset and made available in the form of gzipped postscript files through this web site. VTO reports

More recent work, the chapters of which are also accessible here (as gzipped postscript files), was a dissertation on the use of Bspline basis functions in the finite element method. Spline Finite Elements

Current projects are:-

Advanced Surface Mathematics (DAMTP)

Healing and transformation of solid models (FEGS Ltd.)

Automatic Hex meshing (FEGS Ltd.)

Other recent projects are:-

Interactive Programmable Feature Recognition ( Liverpool University)

API for Solid Modelling Research (Brunel and GMS)

Robust 2D Booleans over the discrete domain (Smallworld Systems Ltd.)

Finite Element Analysis using B-spline basis functions ( Leeds University)

Control systems for hexapod machines (Geodetic Machines Ltd.)

Teaching of CAGD. He has a 16/24 hour course. The notes will shortly be available from this site, but in the meantime a set of questions used during the course are available, as are a set of notes on those questions. Both are in the form of gzipped postscript files.

Some of the actual course notes are now on this site at
introduction and foundations
linear geometry
curves(1)
curves(2)
surfaces(1)
surfaces(2)
more curves
more surfaces
extra stuff to be fitted in somewhere
but they are subject to editing and tidying up. Further notes will also be added shortly.

Work in Progress

The following papers are in course of development.

June 2000: What shapes remain the same when offset?

Contact Info

emails:-  home       malcolm@geometry.demon.co.uk
          DAMTP      mas33@camnum.amtp.cam.ac.uk

fax and voice-mail           812721   from Cambridge
                       01223-812721   from UK
                     44 1223-812721   from elsewhere.