About CirclePack, the software. (return to CirclePack home)
Copyright (C) 1992--2009. Notice: CirclePack is copyrighted by Ken Stephenson.
It may be used and distributed under terms and conditions of the "GNU General Public License".

Background:
CirclePack is software for creation, manipulation, analysis, and display of circle packings; it handles circle packings having from 4 to (current record) 5,000,000 circles. For more about this topic see "Introduction to Circle Packing: the Theory of Discrete Analytic functions" by Ken Stephenson, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (ISBN 0521823560) and papers on my web page.

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. The last release of this package was in May 2007.

Current Version: The current release is an all Java version (Java 1.6++). This is a much more capable program and it seems to work on all platforms. There is still a C++ library, but it is used only on certain intensive computations; this is currently available only on linux.

For bug reports, comments, or script ideas, and especially for potential applications, write to me: kstephe2 "at" tennessee.edu

Version log: