Alfred Inselberg, the inventor of parallel coordinates (pictured below) will be giving a talk at Columbia this Thursday at 11am. More information in the extended entry.

Columbia Vision and Graphics Center Lecture
Thursday, October 18, 2007, 11am
Schapiro Center, Interschool Lab
Columbia University

Multidimensional Visualization and its Applications

Alfred Inselberg
School of Mathematical Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Senior Fellow in Visualization — San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA

The desire to understand the underlying geometry of multidimensional
problems motivated several visualization methodologies to augment our limited
3-dimensional perception. After a short overview, Parallel Coordinates are
rigorously developed, obtaining a 1-1 mapping between subsets of Euclidean
N-space and subsets of 2-space. It leads to representations of lines, flats,
curves, intersections, hypersurfaces, proximities and geometrical
construction algorithms. Convexity can be visualized in any dimension,
as well as non-orientability (Moebius strip) and other properties of
hypersurfaces. This is a visual multidimensional coordinate system with
applications to air traffic control, visual and automatic data mining,
and interactive models of complex systems.