Przemysław Prusinkiewicz

Przemysław (Przemek) Prusinkiewicz (born 1952) is a Polish computer scientist who advanced the idea that Fibonacci numbers in nature can be in part understood as the expression of certain algebraic constraints on free groups, specifically as certain Lindenmayer grammars. Prusinkiewicz's main work is on the modeling of plant growth through such grammars.

Early life and education in 1978 Prusinkiewicz received his PhD from Warsaw University of Technology.

Career As of 2008 he was a professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary.

Awards Prusinkiewicz received the 1997 SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award for his work.

Influences In 2006, Michael Hensel examined the work of Prusinkiewicz and his collaborators - the Calgary team - in an article published in Architectural Design. Hensel argued that the Calgary team's computational plant models or "virtual plants" which culminated in software they developed capable of modeling various plant characteristics, Their computational models allowed for a "quantitative understanding of developmental mechanisms" and had the potential to "lead to a synthetic understanding of the interplay between various aspects of development."

Prusinkiewicz's work was informed by that of the Hungarian biologist Aristid Lindenmayer

Publications