Przemysław Prusinkiewicz

Grass-like structures generated with L-systems

Przemysław Prusinkiewicz (born January 25, 1952 ) is a Polish computer scientist who first used the L-systems devised by Aristid Lindenmayer to model natural objects such as plants. In 1997 he received the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his work .

Prusinkiewicz obtained his PhD from the Warsaw University of Technology in 1978 and is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary , where he leads a research group on “Modeling, Simulation and Visualization of Plants”. In 2014 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada .

L systems and LOGO

Prusinkiewicz worked closely with Lindenmayer, the creator of the L-systems. The concept was initially intended to simulate the interaction of any objects, so-called modules. For this purpose, they were formulated in symbolic notation and a number of derivation rules stipulated the behavior of the modules. Prusinkiewicz adopted this idea, but not only used the symbols as a representation for a more complex object, but also gave them a concrete meaning.

He took this meaning from a program in the programming language Logo , in which one could control a character cursor on the screen with simple commands. This made it possible to program simple graphics. Since the drawing object in this program was a turtle, this type of control is called turtle graphics . Prusinkiewicz succeeded in linking these two worlds so that the character strings generated by the Lindenmayer system were interpreted as the command sequence of the turtle graphic. In this way, the first images could be created that illustrated plant growth not only symbolically but also geometrically.

The system he developed was expanded by other scientists, so that a variety of descendants exist today. These include variants in 3D that generate polygon models, programs that can also generate flowers, leaves and fruits, and those that generate randomly generated plants taking statistical aspects into account.

Publications

• Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan: Lindenmayer Systems, Fractals, and Plants (Lecture Notes in Biomathematics) . Springer-Verlag , 1989, ISBN 0-387-97092-4 .
• Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (The Virtual Laboratory) . Springer-Verlag , 1990, ISBN 0-387-97297-8 . ( available as PDF )
• Hans Meinhardt , Przemysław Prusinkiewicz, Deborah R. Fowler: The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells , 3rd edition. Edition, Springer-Verlag , 2003, ISBN 3-540-44010-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://old.siggraph.org/awards/1997/AchievementAward.html
2. ↑ http://algorithmicbotany.org/
3. ↑ RSC Class of 2014. (PDF) (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 7, 2015 ; accessed on September 13, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  

Web links

• Official website - algorithmicbotany.org (English)
• Biography on the website of the University of Calgary (English)