Dianne Carol Hansford (born 1964)^[1] is an American computer scientist known for her research on Coons patches in computer graphics and for her textbooks on computer-aided geometric design, linear algebra, and the mathematics behind scientific visualization. She is a lecturer at Arizona State University in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, and the cofounder of a startup based on her research, 3D Compression Technologies.^[2]

Education and career

Hansford is a 1986 graduate of the University of Utah. She went to Arizona State University for graduate study, earning a master's degree in 1988 and completing her Ph.D. in 1991.^[2] Her dissertation, Boundary Curves with Quadric Precision for a Tangent, Continuous Scattered Data Interpolant, was supervised by Robert E. Barnhill.^[3]

She became a Fulbright Scholar in German, doing postdoctoral research at the Technical University Darmstadt, and then worked in the computing industry for several years, including co-founding 3D Compression Technologies in 2000, before returning to Arizona State as a research scientist in 2004. She became an associate research professor in 2006 and a lecturer in computing in 2016.^[4]

Selected publications

Hansford's books, coauthored with Arizona State University professor Gerald Farin, include:

• The Geometry Toolbox for Graphics and Modeling (A K Peters, 1998);^[5] revised as Practical Linear Algebra: A Geometry Toolbox (A K Peters, 2005; 4th ed., CRC Press, 2021)^[6]
• The Essentials of CAGD (CRC Press, 2000)^[7]
• Mathematical Principles for Scientific Computing and Visualization (A K Peters, 2008)^[8]

She is also the author of a highly cited paper on Coons patches:

• Farin, Gerald; Hansford, Dianne (1999), "Discrete Coons patches", Computer Aided Geometric Design, 16 (7): 691–700, doi:10.1016/S0167-8396(99)00031-X, MR 1718057