University of Georgia

Mathematics Department Colloquium

Julie Mitchell

Assistant Principal Scientist

San Diego Supercomputer Center (UCSD)

December 2, 2002 (Monday), 2:30 pm

Generating rotation sets that are uniform with respect to the Haar measure on SO(3)


Abstract: For certain applications, particularly in crystallography, it is desirable to have a uniformly distributed set of 3D rotations. However, there are mathematical obstacles to constructing a perfectly uniform sample of the special orthogonal group, SO(3). The talk will compare three distinct methods for generating subsets of SO(3) that are approximately uniform with respect to its Haar measure.