"Geometry is the noblest branch of physics."
- W. F. Osgood
The rotating calipers constitutes a powerful, simple and
elegant tool that can solve many computational geometric problems efficiently
in practice. The idea was first proposed by Michael
Shamos in his Ph.D. thesis in 1978 for computing the diameter of a
convex polygon. The animated gif above illustrates his idea. I coined the
name "Rotating Calipers" for the procedure
and generalized it to solve many other problems. In 1983 I presented some
of these results at a conference in Athens, Greece in the following paper.
Godfried T. Toussaint, "Solving geometric
problems with the rotating calipers," Proceedings of IEEE MELECON'83,
Athens, Greece, May 1983.
Soon we will have a lot more here. In the mean time below
are some more links. Also check out Orm's Rotating
Caliper Pagewith lots of
information, and animated gifs. The nice animated gif above was made by
him. Orm's page also has links to his thesis which contains detailed proofs
of the results in the above paper as well as many more results.
