Przemysław Prusinkiewicz
Przemysław Prusinkiewicz ( born January 25, 1952) is a Polish computer scientist who first began the imaginary of Aristid Lindenmayer L- systems to model natural objects such as plants. For his work he was awarded in 1997 with the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award.
Prusinkiewicz earned his doctorate in 1978 at the Technical University of Warsaw and is currently a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary, where he heads a research group on "Modelling, simulation and visualization of plants".
L- systems and LOGO
Prusinkiewicz worked closely with Lindenmayer, the creator of L- systems. The concept was initially intended to simulate interaction of arbitrary objects called modules. For this purpose, they were formulated in symbolic notation and a set of inference rules laid down the behavior of the modules. Prusinkiewicz took over this idea, the symbols used not only as a representation of a more complex object, but showed them a concrete meaning to.
This meaning he took over from a program of the Logo programming language in which you could control a character cursor on the screen using simple commands. This made it possible to program simple graphics. Since the drawing object was a turtle in this program, this type of control is called turtle graphics. Prusinkiewicz succeeded to combine these two worlds, so that's generated by the Lindenmayer System, strings were interpreted as a command the turtle graphics. Thus, the first images that plant growth illustrated not only symbolically but geometrically could be produced.
The system he developed has been extended by other scientists, so that today there is a variety of derivatives. Among these variants are in 3D which create polygon models, the programs can also create flowers, leaves and fruits, and what that generate randomly generated plants, taking into account statistical aspects.
Publications
- Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan: Lindenmayer Systems, Fractals, and Plants ( Lecture Notes in Biomathematics ). Springer - Verlag, 1989, ISBN 0-387-97092-4.
- Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (The Virtual Laboratory). Springer - Verlag, 1990, ISBN 0-387-97297-8. ( available as PDF)
- Hans Meinhardt, Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Deborah R. Fowler: The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells, 3rd edition, Springer- Verlag, 2003, ISBN 3-540-44010-0.