About CirclePack, the software. (return to CirclePack home)
Copyright (C) 1992--2006. Notice: CirclePack is copyrighted by Ken Stephenson.
It may be used and distributed under terms and conditions of the "GNU General Public License".

Background:
CirclePack is software for creation, manipulation, analysis, and display of circle packings; it handles circle packings having from 4 to (current record) 5,000,000 circles. For more about this topic see "Introduction to Circle Packing: the Theory of Discrete Analytic functions" by Ken Stephenson, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (ISBN 0521823560) and papers on my web page.

Thanks to the many people who have helped with development of this program over several years (with my apologies to anyone I might have overlooked): My work with students has resulted in many program features: Tomasz Dubejko, G. (Brock) Williams, Woodrow Johnson, Jason Howard, James Ashe. For special help with Java and C++ programming: Fedor Andreev, Ben Pack, and Sam Reynolds. Thanks also to the National Science Foundation for supporting my research on circle packing.

Prehistory: I started developing CirclePack using the C language in the early 1990's, with continual improvements in capability, graphics, and features as the mathematics and its applications evolved. I consider it to be an experimental laboratory for discrete conformal geometry and discrete analytic function theory. The C version of CirclePack ran on X-windows under a GUI which is no longer viable and I abandoned attempts to keep it working. Instead I ported the user interface tasks to Java. Note, however, most computations and manipulations remained in a shared C++ library (libSA_lib.so), so the initial release was only for linux systems. Thanks to Fedor Andreev there is now a Windows version. (The longer range plan is to port the C++ code so the software is pure Java.)

For bug reports, comments, or script ideas, and especially for potential applications, write to me: kens "at" math.utk.edu

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