Mathematical Foundations in Visualization

Mathematical concepts and tools have shaped the field of visualization in fundamental ways and played a key role in the development of a large variety of visualization techniques. In this chapter, we sample the visualization literature to provide a taxonomy of the usage of mathematics in visualization, and to identify a fundamental set of mathematics that should be taught to students as part of an introduction to contemporary visualization research. Within the scope of this chapter, we are unable to provide a full review of all mathematical foundations of visualization; rather, we identify a number of concepts that are useful in visualization, explain their significance, and provide references for further reading.