User:Crdueck
~WIP - No Markup ~
Personal Info
Hello, my name is Chris. I'm a first year mathematics student at the University of Waterloo (Canada) with a strong⋅ interest in computer science and programming.
Contact Info
email: crdueck@uwaterloo.ca alt: cdueck93@gmail.ca irc: crdueck (find me on freenode, i'll be in #brlcad)
Programming Experience
I have experience with C (as well as Scheme and Python), and would be more than happy to have an opportunity to learn C++ while working on my project.
Most of my experience so far has come from school assignments, projecteuler.net (programming challenges with a mathematical twist, check it out if you haven't heard of it before), and small personal pet projects.
I have knowledge of data structures and algorithms from my courses at school.
I have a solid foundation in basic university level mathematics (one of my primary reasons for wanting to participate⋅ in the GSoC is to further my mathematical knowledge in the subject of computer generated models)
Project Summary
Currently, most primitives in BRLCAD do not have volume, centroid, or surface area functions. My goal is to implement volume and centroid functions for at least: - ell (sph) - tor - rec - rcc - hyp - arb8 - arbn - pipe
These primitives are mostly simple solids of revolution or other simple shapes and thus it will be easy to construct explicit formulas for their volumes and centroids.
Proposal ~WIP~
Timeline
Present - May 21 - compile BRLCAD from SVN source, ensure build environment is working - become familiar with submitting patches to SVN - become familiar with source code for my targeted primitives - get comfortable with using mged to generate primitives for testing - participate with the BRLCAD community on irc, mailing list etc
Week 1 (May 22nd to 27th) - implement a volume and centroid function for ell - test implementation for correctness
Week 2 (May 28th to June 3rd) - implement a volume and centroid function for tor - test implementation for correctness
Week 3 (June 4th to 10th) - implement a volume and centroid function for rec and rcc - test implementation for correctness
Week 4/5 (June 11th to 24th) - implement a volume and centroid function for arb8 and arbn - test implementation for correctness
Week 6/7 (June 25th to July 1st) - implement a volume and centroid function for pipe (lin_pipe and bend_pipe) - test implementation for correctness
Week 8/9 (July 2nd - 8th) - time to review code, more testing
Week 10 (July 9th - 13th) - midterm evaluation
Week 11 (July 14th - 22nd) - ??? - implement surface area functions for choice functions? - project needs more content
Me && GSoC
I want to participate in GSoC 2012 for many reasons. Firstly, to develop a stronger understanding of how⋅ mathematics is implemented by computers in the real world. My courses at school consist of a lot of theory, and I havent seen much of the application side of things yet. When searching for a potential organization to apply to, I knew i wanted to work on mathematics related software, BRL-CAD caught my eye right away.
I also hope to greatly expand my programming skills in a real world development setting. I feel that i can improve myself as a programmer by leaps and bounds this summer by working with the devs at BRL-CAD. This is also a great chance to get involved with the opensource community. As an avid user of opensource software, contributing⋅ back to an opensource project has been something I have wished to pursue for a while now, but am just recently confident enough in my skills to be able to meaningfully contribute. If accepted, I plan on continuing my involvment with BRLCAD. Having already invested some time familiarizing myself with BRLCAD's source library, i'm considering completing some of my proposed goals this summer even if my application is unsuccesful.
