David Palmer

David is a PhD student in computer science and a member of the Geometric Data Processing Group. His current research focuses on the hexahedral (hex) meshing problem, which is of interest for applications, including fluid and nonlinear elastic simulations. Automatically computing high-quality hex meshes is a significant problem largely due to the complicated topology of hex mesh singularities, regions of a mesh for which the combinatorial structure is irregular. David’s research addresses challenges through the lens of smooth geometry. The field-based meshing research program replaces the hard combinatorial problem of hex meshing with computing a smooth volumetric frame field, encoding the alignment of the mesh elements with the ultimate aim of recovering a mesh from the field. While frame fields take values in nonlinear, non-convex algebraic spaces (the octahedral and odeco varieties), he has studied the geometry of these spaces and developed manifold-based optimization methods tailored to the frame field problem. He has created aMATLAB toolkit, ARFF, which allows him to experiment directly with high-dimensional spaces and complex topologies.David earned anAB in computer science from Harvard University and anMAS in mathematics from University ofCambridge, England.