Provably good mesh generation

Several versions of the problem of generating triangular meshes for finite-element methods are studied. It is shown how to triangulate a planar point set or a polygonally bounded domain with triangles of bounded aspect ratio, how to triangulate a planar point set with triangles having no obtuse angles, how to triangulate a point set in arbitrary dimension with simplices of bounded aspect ratio, and how to produce a linear-size Delaunay triangulation of a multidimensional point set by adding a linear number of extra points. All the triangulations have size within a constant factor of optimal and run in optimal time O(n log n+k) with input of size n and output of size k. No previous work on mesh generation simultaneously guarantees well-shaped elements and small total size.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>