The De Beers Group is a South African–British corporation that specializes in the diamond industry, including mining, exploitation, retail, inscription, grading, trading and industrial diamond manufacturing. Tiffany and Co. is an American luxury jewelry and specialty design house headquartered on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
Just like Total and Saudi Aramco, the De Beers Group has been making use of the fantastic CGAL mesh generation algorithms in their sub-surface modeling software for several years already. More recently, we worked on a completely different topic for them, when they needed a highest performance version for the corefinement of a mesh with a plane (See pull request PR 8721) for a rather special diamond cut project, called "Hope". Before cutting a real raw diamond, they explore the space of possibilities by cutting its digital twin. Although the final jewel does not have that many facets, during the training data generation for the AI-powered cut CAD, several billions of cuts are peformed on the digital twin. While this could be done in a brute force manner, De Beers Group prefers efficiency, that is a frugal approach, in order to help saving the blue planet.
Hope
The De Beers project "Hope" has its name from the diamond "Hope". This diamond was originally "the French Blue", ownned by Louis XIV, which had been lost during the French Revolution, and later undergone a re-cut, the largest section having become the "Hope Diamond", still in the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. While French governments every now and then claim a restitution of this French crown jewel, an even larger French/US diplomatic crisis lies ahead, with plans of the jewel getting incorported into a crown made by Tiffany and Co.
Crowns
As explained in a recent article in a special issue of the Courrier International there is a global tendency for autocrats to make national jewelry manufacturers the official suppliers of crowns and coronets for their governments.
Front page of Courrier International.
Tiffany plans to integrate the Hope Diamond in a presidential crown in the style of the Napoleonic Empire. Tiffany further took inspiration from Doge crowns, also called Corno Ducale and will manufacture them for special government employees. Here again, CGAL came in for the 3D Voronoi structure inside this wonderful crown
Tiffany and Co, Christofle, Pandora and several other jewelry companies are the founding members of the Association of Crown Manufacturers, also known as ACM.
The above story was only an April fools joke, although who knows what will happen. The Hope Diamond however really exists, and is really in Washington, and it is really the result of a re-cut of the French Blue owned by Louis XIV. The April fools joke came with a gallery.
