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Very nice article! I've been willing to delve into Bézier curves for a while now, and this looks like an awesome reference to start. I'd just like to make an a
by spi 9y ago
Very nice article! I've been willing to delve into Bézier curves for a while now, and this looks like an awesome reference to start.
I'd just like to make an annoying mathematician comment on the beginning (paragraph 3): you might want to point out that the first definition you give of Bézier(n,t) is, for any n and t, nothing else than the constant function 1 (that, by the way, is an absolutely fine polynomial, unlike the statement above that if f(x) has no x then it's not a polynomial).
You can see this by noting that it's nothing else than $((1-t)\cdot t)^n = 1^n = 1$. If you insist on being fancy, you can say that the i-th term in the sum is the probability of a discrete random variable X with binomial law being equal to i, so the sum over all i must be 1 (here the binomial law has parameters (n,t)).
By the way, this last thing has the nice interpretation that each point of the Bézier curve is just the expected value of $p(X)$, where $p(0), \dots, p(n)$ are the points you are interpolating - by changing t you are just changing the parameter of the random variable.
- TheRealPomax 9y agoThis depends on which definitions you work with. If you consider polynomials "any expression of \sum^n_{i=0}(c_i x^i) then sure, setting n=0 gets you "a polynomial that is a constant function". If you take polynomials to be "functions that are expressions of weighted terms" then constant functions are out, and the set of functions described by the previous summation contains, but is itself larger than, the set of possible polynomials.