Paul de Casteljau

Paul de Casteljau (born 1930 in Besançon, France) is a French physicist and mathematician. In 1959, while working at Citroën, he developed an algorithm for computation of Bézier curves, which would later be formalized and popularized by engineer Pierre Bézier. De Casteljau's algorithm is widely used, with some modifications, as it is the most robust and numerically stable method for evaluating polynomials. Other methods, such as Horner's method and forward differencing, are faster for calculating single points but are less robust. De Casteljau's algorithm is still very fast for subdividing a Bézier curve into two curve segments at an arbitrary parametric location.

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