Why call it Tinfour

Recently, a couple of users asked why this project is called Tinfour. So it now seems appropriate to offer an explanation.

The “tin” part of the name is straightforward. The acronym TIN stands for Triangulated Irregular Network. The core data structure used in the Tinfour project, the Delaunay Triangulation, is a specific kind of TIN with a number of desirable properties.

The “four” part is a bit more nuanced. In French, the word four has the same meaning as the English word "oven". So you can think of Tinfour as a kind of oven for baking TINs. This etymology is also the inspiration for the cake icon that shows up in some of the Tinfour applications. About the time I was trying to choose a name for this project, my mother-in-law served petit fours while we were visiting her. So desserts were definitely one of the inspirations for the name.

Of course, in English the word “four” is just a number. And its use in the name Tinfour is a reflection of the quad-edge structure that serves as the building block for the graph-theoretical structures the software produces.

Finally, the "four" part of the name reflects a bit of project history. The logic used in the current TIN implementation was preceded by three distinctly different approaches to creating a TIN that were tried and, ultimately, rejected. So it took four tries to get the software right. Referring to that fact in the project name is a recognition that, to whatever degree the Tinfour package is successful, it is due as much to persistence as inspiration.

References

Fat Cow (2018). Free Farm-Fresh Web Icons https://www.fatcow.com/free-icons

Guibas, L., Stolfi, J (1985). “Primitives for the Manipulation of General Subdivisions and the Computation of Voronoi Diagrams”, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol 4, No. 2, April 1985, p 74-123.