Re: Find the center!
- To: mathgroup at christensen.cybernetics.net
- Subject: [mg1164] Re: Find the center!
- From: Jonathan.Rice at cs.tcd.ie (Jonathan Rice)
- Date: Sat, 20 May 1995 02:33:24 -0400
- Organization: TCD, Computer Science
In article <3p652m$kb1 at news0.cybernetics.net> wagner at bullwinkle.cs.Colorado.EDU (Dave Wagner) writes: > In article <3p1dtm$n2n at news0.cybernetics.net>, > Gottfried Mayer-Kress <gmk at pegasos.ccsr.uiuc.edu> wrote: > > > >There are a bunch of points in 3-space and they are supposed to be > >scattered around the surface of a sphere. You want to find the > >center of the sphere and the radius. > > > >NB: The data are noisy (about 2% of the radius) and only cover a patch > >on the sphere. > > > >I think I have a reasonable solution, but maybe someone knows of some > >real elegant method? > > There were several approaches to this problem in The Mathematica Journal > a couple of years ago, in several different issues. They probably were > in Paul Abbott's "Tricks of the Trade" column. > > Dave Wagner You could also check out "An Efficient Bounding Sphere" by Jack Ritter in _Graphics_Gems_, ed. Andrew Glassner, Academic Press, 1990. This algorithm is for general point sets in 3D. -- Jonathan Rice