This is Jesse H. Willett's homepage.

As you can guess if you're viewing this site, my email address is jhw@lmi.net.

You can peruse my resume. Please bear in mind that I'm not promoting myself as a web designer.

My search engine of first resort is Google:

In my copious spare time (i.e. I haven't worked on this for two years), I'm developing a visualization tool for playing with various geometric forms. Some features:

• OpenGL graphics which are getting faster and prettier
• Tools for generating a large subset of 2D simplicial complexes:
  • geodesic spheres
  • geodesic toruses
  • crystal lattices
• A simple but careful physics engine
  • damped springs
  • viscous medium
  • pressurized gas (ideal, adiabatic, parameterized gamma)
  • careful attention to energy transfer and conservation

My goal with this project is to simulate things like hot air balloons, vacuum baloons, and ultimately a practical solar-powered dirigible partial-vacuum aerostat. Here are some screenshots of my progress so far.

• simple icosahedron
• subdivided, pressurized icosahedron
• cross-supported subdivided icosahedron
• spinning cross-supported subdivided icosahedron
• cross-supported, inflated, left-chiral 6x12 torus
• early vision of the aerostat

I would very much welcome correspondence from anybody with an interest in these matters.

Also, as a nod to academic honesty, here is the source code which generated those images. I'm compiling on Red Hat 9.0 which includes XFree86 4.3.0-2 and the Mesa 5.0.1 implementation of OpenGL 1.3. I have machine which was fast two years ago, a 833Mhz Pentium-something-or-other, 133Mhz bus, 768 MB RAM. This code is still in the experimental-brainstorming state. Pre-alpha. It is undocumented and has poor error handling mechanisms. The bibliography is far from complete. Nevertheless, I'm posting this snapshot as documentation of process.

More recently, I tried to get this same code package to run under X/Cygwin. Happily, it ran perfectly without a single char of source code edits. I did have to change the path to the OpenGL libraries in the Makefile, but I didn't touch anything else. Let that stand as an awed testament to the beauty of Cygwin, without which the last two years of Windows work would have been much less productive and no fun at all.

A couple of pictures of me. I don't live in Tasmania, I just visited there recently and my Dad, Brock, took a bunch of pictures.

• Enjoying the View at Mt. Field, Tasmania
• Jesse and Brock at Lake Osbourne, Tasmania
• Jesse at the Salamanca market, Hobart, Tasmania
• Picture of Josh, an old high school buddy, and me at Marin Headlands