Am halfway through the painstaking process of solving 2 simultaneous quadratics, of a slightly simpler form that that mentioned in the previous post. I need to find all m & n such that the following 2 equations are satisfied:

Amm + Bm + C = Dnn + En + FGmm + Hm + I = Jnn + Kn + L

I’ve spent about an hour and a half on it so far [spread out over 24 hours of course], and I keep making simple substitution errors. I just hope I’m at least on the right track. I was always good at high school maths, but never went much beyond it [except in the ad hoc way that proved useful to programming]. Also I’m over 30 now, which means that my skills are on the decline. If I ever get it right I will post it here in the hope that other miserable programmers like myself will be able to one day do a search for "simultaneous quadratic solution" and actually get a useful result.

Why To Bother?

The reason I want to work this problem out properly is so that I can perform standard boolean operations on quadratic paths… the paths I use for virtually ALL of my non 3D rendering (including fonts). In english that means that it will allow me to easily combine a letter S with a letter U with the result being made up of continuous outlines with no overlap. It may sound simple but mathematically it’s a real pain. Flash offers a good example of what I want to be able to do: when you draw a shape over the top of another, the shape beneath is actually "cut" by the shape on top, so that there is no overlap. For some reason, possibly my inferior searching skills, I have been unable to find such an algorithm documented, which is why I am trying to nut it out myself. *sigh*

Unrelated Things You Should Look At

• A Creation Science Fair - Slightly tongue in cheek, amazing site
• A terabit of storage in 1970 - Over 100 gigabytes of data stored optically

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2003 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.