Mickey Flies the Stealth

Abstract

This article describes in a vivid and popular way the intimate relationship between mathematics, computer graphics, entertainment and warfare. Entertainment, mathematics and war: what a strange trio! The mixture of brilliance and glory, brutality and suffering that inheres in its story would require an Aeschylus to get the proportions right. I recently attended a large conference of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, an international organization. The range of topics discussed by the conferees was enormous, going from fluid dynamics to biomathematical problems to econometrics to computer vision to mathematical cryptography. A major talk by Christoph Bregler on computer animation of human movements including facial expressions feeds right into the needs of this strange trio. In talking to the conference participants, I learned that the marriage of war, mathematics and entertainment is now taken for granted just as they take for granted the marriage of entertainment, mathematics and medical imaging. The link in both cases: computer graphics, animation, and the formation of virtual objects. The threefold combination first entered my consciousness forcibly when I read a 1997 report of the National Research Council entitled Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense. This report was based on a workshop held in October 1996 that was attended by people from the film, video game, and theme-park industries and also by people from the defense department and their contractors. The object of the conference was to discuss common interests and how they might help each other. The notions of entertainment, mathematics, and war together with their ambiguities and misapprehensions, are sufficiently understood so I shall build up to the threefold combination in stages by beginning with the twofold. Mathematics and entertainment: This combination is ancient. Simple puzzles or games of chance and of strategy often have a mathematical underlay. More recently, sports of all kinds have experienced increasing mathematization through the accumulation of statistics and the decisions based on them. Mathematics itself