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Lecture 7: Geometry And Splines (82)
knguyen0811

Correct me if I'm wrong but in laymen terms, a convex hull is just an enclosed space, made up of the outermost points, that contains a set of specific points?

muminovic

The way I've heard it described visually is to imagine that all the points in your graph are like nails in a wall. A convex hull containing some set of points/nails A would be like stretching a rubber band around the nails in the set A; there's a nice gif here visualizing this (scroll to bottom) --https://www.maa.org/external_archive/joma/Volume8/Kalman/ConvexHull.html

aliceshan

The way I remember it is as "the smallest possible area that contains all the points"

aliceshan

In class, the professor gave the example that the convex hull can be useful in checking whether 2 or more curves can overlap by checking if the convex hulls overlap.

buaazhangfan

The convex hull of a finite point set S is the set of all convex combinations of its points. These points are joined together to form a Bezier polygon, and Bezier Curve is in the convex hull of this polygon

john-b-yang

I thought this Math Overflow post was pretty helpful in terms of expanding on why this property is significant: https://bit.ly/2GZ7FvH. In a nutshell, I think this property enforces why we are even able to control how the curve looks with control points.

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