A jump on visualization: the bottom-up approach

Visualization-using computer graphics to gain insight into complex phenomena-is a powerful tool for scientific computing, but visualization experts and computational scientists seem to live in separate worlds. Recently, however, the gap between these two worlds has narrowed, and scientific visualization has come to represent the marriage of supercomputing and graphics. Computer graphics provides the basic functions for generating complex images from abstract data; visualization employs graphics to make pictures that provide insight into abstract data and symbols. The pictures can directly portray data or present it in an innovative form. Learning programming in graphics and visualization might seem time-consuming or difficult, and the many tools and programs might seem overwhelming. Fortunately, if you know what graphics provide and how they work, you can start using and researching visualization without becoming a graphics expert. In this article, I explain how to work with graphics and I discuss various visualization techniques, tools and areas of research.