Practical Linear Algebra, 3rd Edition

Chapter 20

Curves

Earlier in this book, we mentioned that all letters that you see here were designed by a font designer, and then put into a font library. The font designer’s main tool is a cubic curve, also called a cubic Bézier curve. Such curves are handy for font design, but they were initially invented for car design. This happened in France in the early 1960s at Rénault and Citroën in Paris. These techniques are still in use today, as illustrated in Figure 20.1. We will briefly outline this kind of curve, and also apply previous linear algebra and geometric concepts to the study of curves in general. This type of work is called geometric modeling or computer-aided geometric design; see an introductory text such as [7]. Please keep in mind: ...