Great job on taking the time to do a writeup! Last year, I designed a similar algorithm from scratch one weekend to implement some complex spatio-temporal visua

Great job on taking the time to do a writeup! Last year, I designed a similar algorithm from scratch one weekend to implement some complex spatio-temporal visualizations. I was ecstatic because it was faster than Quadtrees. I thought that I had invented something new. Later, I read somewhere that a mathematician had invented that algorithm close to 200 years ago! Not only did that burst my bubble, but it also made me feel stupid for not having found it. Anyway, using this approach I was able to implement a Linear Quadtree in Javascript using Typed arrays that could accommodate 1 Arc Second resolution all the way up to 60 Arc Minutes if you wanted to. It is extremely performant and I ended up using it to do some really neat animated heatmaps. I went through the invention process myself only to realize someone had thought of that problem ~200 years ago. No idea why that person did it though. I suppose mathematicians did that back in the days....wonder what the application was! This process is known as Z-Order Curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-order_(curve)). You can quickly get to an index in memory or a cell/location on the map using Morton-Encoding. It is also known as a Linear Quadtree. Foundations of Multidimensional and Metric Data Structures is a great resource! Check it out at http://gisandscience.com/2009/08/21/award-winning-book-by-hanan-samet-details-spatial-data-indexing-processes/ http://gisandscience.com/2009/08/21/award-winning-book-by-ha....