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Ordered Heaps and the Fast Marching Method
Author

Daniel Lichtblau
Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
Description

This talk will explore in some detail a particular structure that seems to receive scant attention within the Mathematica community.

Ordered heaps are data structures one uses when rapid access is needed to a "first" element, and one must also be able to add new elements. A classical application is to sorting a set according to some ordering on a the domain in which the elements live. Another application is to solving a type of numerical PDE via Sethian's "fast marching method". A simple example, shape offsetting, is to find equidistant curves to a given planar curve. We illustrate these two applications in this talk.
Subject

*Wolfram Technology > Kernel > Data Structures
Keywords

Binary Tree, Data Structures, Heap Sort, Ordered Heap, Sethian's "fast marching method"
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HeapAndFastMarchingTalk.nb (962.3 KB) - Mathematica Notebook