ABSTRACT
Much of graphics is just translating math directly into code. The cleaner the math, the cleaner the resulting code; so much of this book concentrates on using just the right math for the job. This chapter reviews various tools from high school and college mathematics and is designed to be used more as a reference than as a tutorial. It may appear to be a hodge-podge of topics and indeed it is; each topic is chosen because it is a bit unusual in “standard” math curricula, because it is of central importance in graphics, or because it is not typically treated from a geometric standpoint. In addition to establishing a review of the notation used in the book, the chapter also emphasizes a few points that are sometimes skipped in the standard undergraduate curricula, such as barycentric coordinates on triangles. This chapter is not intended to be a rigorous treatment of the material; instead intuition and geometric interpretation are emphasized. A discussion of linear algebra is deferred until Chapter 5 just before transformation matrices are discussed. Readers are encouraged to skim this chapter to familiarize themselves with the topics covered and to refer back to it as needed. The exercises at the end of the chapter may be useful in determining which topics need a refresher.
