Link Archive

I've always been fascinated with patterns. It doesn't really matter what kind of patterns; I've played with networks, leaves and leaf venation, branches, lightning, flocking, tracing outlines of shapes, river formation, rock sediments, landscapes, slime mold, lichens,reaction-diffusion, cellular automaton, some fractals, and a few other things. I think what I enjoy the most is how complex and intricate results you can get from a set of simple rules.

At ITP, I teach a course entitled Introduction to Computational Media. In this course, the students learn the basics of programming (variables, conditionals, loops, objects, arrays) as well as a survey of applications related to making interactive projects (images, pixels, computer vision, networking, data, 3D). The course mostly follows the material found in my intro book Learning Processing; in many ways, The Nature of Code serves as a follow-up. Once you’ve learned the basics and seen an array of applications, your next step might be to delve deeply into a particular area. For example, you could focus on computer vision (and read a book like Greg Borenstein’s Making Things See). In the most basic sense, this book is one possible next step in a world of many. It picks up exactly where Learning Processingleaves off, demonstrating more advanced programming techniques with Processing that focus on algorithms and simulation.

This web page contains a free electronic version of my (soon to be) self-published textbook Algorithms, along with other lecture notes I have written for various theoretical computer science classes at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 1998.

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