Talk:Line-cylinder intersection

“This time for sure!” Hoping to resurrect a 13 year old draft article

I am not a mathematician, nor an experienced Wikipedian. My work does often involves computer simulations based on 3d analytic geometry and computational geometry. A while back I needed to compute intersections of lines and spheres. Fortunately there is a good Wikipedia article on that topic: Line–sphere intersection. It allowed me to quickly write the needed code.

More recently, I needed to compute analogous intersections of lines and arbitrary cylinders. I was disappointed to find there was not a corresponding article in Wikipedia. I did some web searching and found bits and pieces of the solution I needed in places like stackoverflow.com, math.stackexchange.com, and GitHub.com. None of them were quite what I needed until I followed a link from an answer on math.stackexchange.com to (surprise!) Wikipedia. There I found exactly the article I was looking for. It was clear, well written, very general, and in a form which I could easily turn into working code. The odd part was that it was on the user page of @Nominal Animal!

I got in touch with Nominal Animal and learned they had tried to create an article on this topic in 2010 which was declined in review. Nominal Animal set the project aside, archiving the article on their user page. I am so glad they did!

Now with the blessings of Nominal Animal, I am working on a new draft of the article with some additions which I hope will push it over the line of AfC review.

— BananaSlug (talk) 16:58, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Huzzah!

Thanks to @Ca for the very quick review, helpful changes, and moving this article into the main Wikipedia namespace.

Thanks to @Nominal Animal for doing the real work of writing the excellent pre-draft article 13 years ago. All I did was add an introductory section, with some supporting citations, some External Links, and created a diagram showing the four intersection cases. BananaSlug (talk) 17:07, 18 December 2023 (UTC)