Przemysław (Przemek) Prusinkiewicz is a Polish

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

who advanced the idea that

Fibonacci number In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers, commonly denoted , form a sequence, the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding ones. The sequence commonly starts from 0 and 1, although some authors start the sequence from ...

s in nature can be in part understood as the expression of certain algebraic constraints on

free group In mathematics, the free group ''F'S'' over a given set ''S'' consists of all words that can be built from members of ''S'', considering two words to be different unless their equality follows from the group axioms (e.g. ''st'' = ''suu''−1' ...

s, specifically as certain Lindenmayer grammars. Prusinkiewicz's main work is on the modeling of plant growth through such

grammars In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes domains ...

Early life and education

in 1978 Prusinkiewicz received his

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

from

Warsaw University of Technology The Warsaw University of Technology ( pl, Politechnika Warszawska, lit=Varsovian Polytechnic) is one of the leading institutes of technology in Poland and one of the largest in Central Europe. It employs 2,453 teaching faculty, with 357 professor ...

Career

As of 2008 he was a professor of

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

at the

University of Calgary The University of Calgary (U of C or UCalgary) is a public research university located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The University of Calgary started in 1944 as the Calgary branch of the University of Alberta, founded in 1908, prior to being ins ...

Awards

Prusinkiewicz received the 1997

SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia ...

''Computer Graphics Achievement Award'' for his work.

Influences

In 2006, Michael Hensel examined the work of Prusinkiewicz and his collaborators - the Calgary team - in an article published in

Architectural Design Building design refers to the broadly based architectural, engineering and technical applications to the design of buildings. All building projects require the services of a building designer, typically a licensed architect. Smaller, less complic ...

. Hensel argued that the Calgary team's computational plant models or "virtual plants" which culminated in software they developed capable of modeling various plant characteristics, could provide important lessons for architectural design. Architects would learn from "the self-organisation processes underlying the growth of living organisms" and the Calgary team's work uncovered some of that potential. Their computational models allowed for a "quantitative understanding of developmental mechanisms" and had the potential to "lead to a synthetic understanding of the interplay between various aspects of development." Prusinkiewicz's work was informed by that of the Hungarian biologist

Aristid Lindenmayer Aristid Lindenmayer (17 November 1925 – 30 October 1989) was a Hungarian biologist. In 1968 he developed a type of formal languages that is today called L-systems or Lindenmayer Systems. Using those systems Lindenmayer modelled the behaviour ...

who developed the theory of

L-systems An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar. An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some ...

in 1968. Lindenmayer used L-systems to describe the behaviour of plant cells and to model the growth processes, plant development and the branching architecture of plant development.

Publications

* *

References

External links

Biography of Przemysław Prusinkiewicz
from the

Laboratory website
at the

Warsaw University of Technology alumni Polish mathematicians Living people Computer graphics professionals Computer graphics researchers Fibonacci numbers Polish computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) University of Calgary faculty {{poland-mathematician-stub