Mesh Generation

A mesh is a discretization of a geometric domain into small simple shapes, such as triangles or quadrilaterals in two dimensions and tetrahedra or hexahedra in three. Meshes nd use in many application areas. In geography and cartography, meshes give compact representations of terrain data. In computer graphics, most objects are ultimately reduced to meshes before rendering. Finally, meshes are almost essential in the numerical solution of di erential equations arising in physical simulation. In this chapter, we concentrate on algorithms for this last application, assuming an audience including both practitioners such as engineers and theoreticians such as computational geometers and numerical analysts.