CirclePack is software for creation, manipulation, analysis, and display of circle packings; it handles circle packings having from 4 to the current record of 5,000,000 circles. For more about this topic see my book,
"Introduction to Circle Packing: The Theory of Discrete Analytic Functions", Cambridge University Press (2005).
Thanks to the many people who have helped with development of this program over several years (with my apologies to anyone I might have overlooked). My work with students has resulted in many program features: Tomasz Dubejko, G. (Brock) Williams, Woodrow Johnson, Jason Howard, James Ashe, and Gerald Orick. For special programming help: Fedor Andreev, Ben Pack, and Sam Reynolds. Thanks also to the National Science Foundation for supporting my research on circle packing.
PREHISTORY:I started developing
CirclePack using the C language in the early 1990's, with continual improvements in capability, graphics, and features as the mathematics and its applications evolved. I have always treated the software as an experimental laboratory for discrete conformal geometry and discrete analytic function theory. The original C version of
CirclePack ran on X-windows and was abandoned when the GUI XView was no longer viable. I ported the user interface tasks to Java, with most computations and manipulations remaining in a shared C++ library. This worked fine under Linux, and thanks to Fedor Andreev, there was a Windows version. Initial release of software was in 1992.
View current version.CURRENT VERSION:
The current release is essentially all Java, and should work on all platforms. There remain system calls to "triangle" and "qhull" in special cases where Delaunay triangulations are needed. (These may not be available on all systems; any help in implementing them more broadly would be welcomed.) There is also a powerful alternate packing algorithm implemented in Matlab and called "GOpack" (see paper by Collins, Orick, and Stephenson). This is available at
www.github.com/kensmath/GOpack. It is very fast, but is useful only for maximal packings involving 100,000 or more circles. For bug reports, comments, or script ideas, and especially for potential applications, please
contact Ken.NOTICE:Copyright © 1992 - 2018.
CirclePack is copyrighted by Ken Stephenson. It may be used and distributed under terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License.
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