9500643 Schumaker The objectives of this project are to develop new classes of splines defined on the sphere and on sphere-like surfaces, to develop explicit numerical algorithms tailored to the sphere, and to explore their applications. Other research to be performed involves wavelets for trigonometric splines and for splines on triangulations, quasi-interpolation by trigonometric splines, splines on quadrangulations, adaptive knot removal and insertion for bivariate splines, and fitting of data in many variables. In the past 30 years, spline functions have become a well-established computational tool, and are now widely used by scientists and engineers. They are used for a variety of purposes, including approximating complicated curves and surfaces, fitting data, computer-aided geometric design (CAGD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), solution of differential equations, image processing, etc. The aim of this research is to develop new spline tools, and to create algorithms for solving some specific applications problems, especially problems arising in CAGD, CAM, geology, geophysics, and meteorology.
