The CGAL Editorial Board was invited by Accenture France to perform a self-assessment. This one week workshop in a monastery in the Maritime Alps was a unique experience, and it came to us as the price of the SoCG Test of Time Award that the CGAL Project received last June. The workshop led to the insight, that to attact even more brillant people than today, we have to give up our egoless programming culture, which, ironically, had been promoted by the same consulting firm around the year 2000.
While it is true that developers are listed as authors of the Manual chapters
the discussion with the bahavioral psychologists of Accenture made us understand
that people expect much more recognition. So do not be surprised when in CGAL 6.0
you will encounter the CGAL::Hyperbolic_Teillaud_diagram_2 as well as the CGAL::Oesau_graph_3.
Welcome Nicolas Bourbaki
In the workshop we also learned that we have to develop a Welcome Culture which puts new developers in the spot light, even before they have made a first contribution. We will do a better job for our 2024 Google Summmer of Code students, but let's start with Nicolas Bourbaki, who currently works at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
Nicolas first contribution will be a Curves and Surfaces package, featuring the Huegelschaeffer Egg and the Conchoid curve, as well as the Seifert surface.
The Huegelschaeffer egg curve.
These curves and surfaces may seem of only theoretical interest which, however, is completely wrong. The conchoid is strongly related to the study of linkages of autonomous humanoid robotics, while the Seifert surface led to the invention of the Quechua 2 tent made by Decathlon.
Back to the Physical World
While a People web page is a nice living document we decided to produce a physical twin with portrait photos not made with an iphone but by a portrait photograph. We are grateful to the Inria Research Center in Sophia-Antipolis which offers a physical wall in the Gilles Kahn Auditorium for hosting the CGAL Editorial Board Gallery.
This April joke came with a gallery.
