The Computer Graphics Companion offers a comprehensive collection of articles written by selected specialists and spanning a wide range of topics and applications in computer graphics.

It brings together all the articles related to computer graphics included in the Encyclopedia of Computer Science along with further material, unique to this companion volume. Additional articles on colour and design are included as well professional profiles and web resources.

Enhanced with a section of colour illustrations, the book gives a general introduction to computer graphics, software, hardware, design, colour and image processing and then focuses on key application areas:

• Entertainment - covering areas such as animation, movies and games
• Science and engineering - including scientific visualisation, biocomputing, medical imaging, diagnostic techniques, geographic information systems and computer-aided design in engineering and manufacturing
• Other applications of computer graphics - reviewing diverse topics, such as virtual reality, multimedia, the internet, desktop publishing and simulation

The book also features:

• Autobiographical profiles by computer graphics professionals, giving a personal insight into working in the field, some of the practical aspects of their current work and their thoughts on the future for graphics.
• An extensive list of web sites for graphics organisations, demonstration software and graphics hardware and software suppliers

Authoritative but accessible, the Computer Graphics Companion is an essential introduction to the field of computer graphics and its applications.

Anthony Ralston is an Academic Visitor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, which he founded in 1967 and chaired until 1980. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books on computer science and related areas, and a frequent contributor to leading books and journals in the field. He has served as president of the American Federation for Information Processing Societies and the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a recipient of the ACM's Distinguished Service Award, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Edwin D. Reilly is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the State University of New York at Albany. He served as the first chairman of its computer science department when founded in 1967 and as the first director of its computing center in 1965. Prior to that time, he served in computer management positions at the General Electric Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, NY. He began his career in computing at the National Security Agency in Washington in 1955. He holds the Ph.D. in physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is currently president of his consulting firm Cybernetic Information Systems. He is the co-author of the textbooks Pascalgorithms (Houghton-Mifflin) and VAX Assembly Language (Macmillan, US). He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, the American Physical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, Sigma Xi, and the America Association for the Advancement of Science.

David Hemmendinger is Associate Professor of Computer Science and department chair at Union College, Schenectady, New York. He has also taught computer science at Wright State University, Ohio. His interests include programming languages, concurrent programming, and formal verification of hardware designs. He began work in computer science in 1981, having previously taught philosophy at the City University of New York, and at Antioch and Kenyon Colleges. He has degrees from Harvard (B.A.) and Stanford Universities (M.S. in mathematics), Yale (M.A., Ph.D. in philosophy) and Wright State University (M.S. in computer science). He is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi.