Dianne Hansford facts for kids

Dianne Carol Hansford (born 1964) is an American computer scientist known for her research on Coons patches in computer graphics and for her textbooks on computer-aided geometric design, linear algebra, and the mathematics behind scientific visualization. She is a lecturer at Arizona State University in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, and the cofounder of a startup based on her research, 3D Compression Technologies.

Education and career

Hansford is a 1986 graduate of the University of Utah. She went to Arizona State University for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1988 and completing her Ph.D. in 1991. Her dissertation, Boundary Curves with Quadric Precision for a Tangent, Continuous Scattered Data Interpolant, was supervised by Robert E. Barnhill.

She became a Fulbright Scholar in German, doing postdoctoral research at the Technical University Darmstadt, and then worked in the computing industry for several years, including co-founding 3D Compression Technologies in 2000, before returning to Arizona State as a research scientist in 2004. She became an associate research professor in 2006 and a lecturer in computing in 2016.

Selected publications

Hansford's books, coauthored with Arizona State University professor Gerald Farin, include:

• The Geometry Toolbox for Graphics and Modeling (A K Peters, 1998); revised as Practical Linear Algebra: A Geometry Toolbox (A K Peters, 2005; 4th ed., CRC Press, 2021)
• The Essentials of CAGD (CRC Press, 2000)
• Mathematical Principles for Scientific Computing and Visualization (A K Peters, 2008)

She is also the author of a highly cited paper on Coons patches: