Draft:Surf (graphics program)

surf is a an open source computer program written to visualize some real algebraic geometry: plane algebraic curves, space curves, and algebraic surfaces in a three-dimensional real affine space.

Surf is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Surf was developed in 1996-1997 at the Friedrich Alexander Universitaet Erlangen-Nuernberg, and since 1997 at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz.

surf provides a C-style programming language for the description of geometric objects. It supports semi-transparency and ray tracing in the Phong reflection model.

surf was written at the suggestion of Wolf Barth by Stephan Endrass, Hans Huelf, Ruediger Oertel, Kai Schneider, Ralf Schmitt, and Johannes Beigel.

Distribution

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surf is packaged in the Debian Linux and derivatives (such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint) as surf-alggeo and in the Fedora Linux as surf-geometry.

It is also provided with the SageMath project.

Derivatives and forks

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There are various derivatives of surf.

  • surfex is a 2008 derivation of surf written in Java by Oliver Labs and Stephan Holzer. It is now distributed as a part of Singular.
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Barth sextic surface visualized with surf.

 
Barth sextic surface visualized with surf

References

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