Course Information

MEETING TIMES:

Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:30 - 4:00, in room 4-370

TEXTBOOK:

Hearn,Donald and M. Pauline Baker, Computer Graphics, C version, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1997, 652 pages, ISBN 0-13-530924-7.

Hearn and Baker will be the textbook for 6.837. This book is well organized and provides a good introduction to most of the topics that we will cover this term. You will find that the illustrations and code fragments are an excellent supplement to the material covered in the lectures. Reading assignments will accompany the lecture notes, which will be placed on the web. You may read the course materials either before or after the lecture that they are associated with.

The primary goal of 6.837 is to introduce many important data structures and algorithms that are useful for presenting data visually on a computer. 6.837 does not cover the use of graphics design applications such as Photoshop and AutoCAD. Nor, does it focus on the various graphics programming interfaces or graphics languages such as OpenGL or Renderman. In short, 6.837 is a programming class. The goal of this class is to provide you with sufficent background to write computer graphics applications.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE TAKING THIS COURSE:

Everyone taking 6.837 should have taken courses in, or reasonable exposure to, basic calculus, linear algebra (e.g. 18.06), and algorithms (e.g. 6.046). We note this now because these topics will not come up to a significant extent until the second part of the course (after the drop date). We also expect everyone to be familar with at least one of the following programming languages: Scheme, C, C++, or Pascal.  Review sessions, open to all students, will be given for linear algebra, algorithms, and C++ programming the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th weeks of class respectively.

GRADING:

Six Problem Sets..................................................................	60%
Final Project.........................................................................	40%