MOTIVATING  GEOMETRY THROUGH
COMPUTATION  AND  VISUALIZATION
funded by NSF-CCLI grant DUE-0126687

 Principal Investigator
David L. Finn
Associate Professor of Mathematics
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Finn's Page | CCLI Info | Applets | Materials | Course Notes | Publications
EXERCISES to EXPLORE with this APPLET
DIRECTIONS:   In this applet, you create a C0 cubic Bezier spline, by placing contol points. When you place 3n+1 points, you create n cubic Bezier curves with the four control points p3i-3, p3i-2, p3i-1, and p3i for i=1,2,...,n defining the each individual Bezier curve. The points p3i with i=1,2,...,n-1 are referred to sometimes as joint points, as they are where two individual curves are joined together.
  1. Play with creating C0 splines.
  2. How does the curve generated by a C0 Bezier spline differ from the curve generated by a Bezier curve with the same control points?
  3. What conditions need to satisfied at a joint point in order for two segments to be joined smoothly?
  4. Using splines can you create a curve that is approximately a circle? If so how?