Coming from a geographic computer sciences background and working with 3D terrain (so please forgive if my terminology is inappropriate), I was always wondering if it is possible to describe the 3D surface of a limited area with a single function/formula.
Think of map tiles:
- a plane with 256 by 256 points (x, y)
- 'seemingly random' height (z) per point (I don´t know how to describe the countless possibilities that nature shows in creating earth's surface)
If it is indeed possible to describe such a surface (which, I guess, is possible somehow), how would one go about deriving this function/formular (...is that actually possible)?
I never really did any research on this since I thought, if that would be an option, someone would have come up with it (think of data transfer reduction if only a formula has to be transferred instead of a whole array of data...given that such a formula is actually computable in reasonable time). Today I thought about it again and couldn´t really phrase it for the internet to enlighten me...or to find any duplicates on this board.
