Why call it Tinfour

Recently, a couple of users asked why this project is called Tinfour. So it seems appropriate to offer a bit of 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” means 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 (by the way, authentic petit fours are really quite good). 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.