User:Douglas M. McKenna

Doug McKenna is an award-winning commercial and research software developer, as well as an award-winning mathematical artist long involved with the Bridges Math/Art community. With Yale undergraduate and graduate (Masters) degrees, he began his career in 1980 as one Benoit Mandelbrot's two full-time research programmers and illustrators at IBM Research, working on geometric fractal drawings for the seminal 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. His first mathematical art shows, beginning in 1981, were regularly advertised as "mathemaesthetics", a portmanteau word McKenna fashioned and later also used as the name of his corporate shell for selling software, because he believes that building software and designing user interfaces is a mathematical art.

McKenna's software product, Resorcerer for Apple Macintosh developers, won a software "Oscar" (Eddy Award) in 1993 for Best New Developer Tool. In 1994 McKenna was awarded the Best Hack award at the annual MacHack conference, for showing how to "fly" window frames around on the desktop along arbitrary spline-defined curves. In 2020, McKenna's art piece "A Unit Domino" won first prize in the Print category at the Joint Mathematics Meeting mathematical art show. The piece is based on research results explained in his dynamically illustrated app/eBook for the iPad, "Hilbert Curves: Outside-In and Inside Gone," which in turn arose out of a five-year project consulting with some researchers at Harvard on the structure of near-loops in quiescent DNA.

Since 1978, McKenna has been privately researching and enumerating space-filling curve constructions, especially those based on the recursive subdivision or the square and various generalizations. In 2004, he described a third fundamental space-filling curve construction for filling the square completely asymmetrically, exemplified by the "7 Curve" and his "Thirteenski" curve, which space-fills a square in scaling distributions comporting with a Sierpinski gasket. He has designed silk scarves based on generalized Peano curve constructions, as well as the Thirteenski construction.

For the last decade, McKenna has been rewriting (from scratch) a new TeX-language-compatible typesetting engine as a reusable C library, which he incorporated into his app/eBook as an initial demonstration case. One day, he hopes it may be ready for others to use.

McKenna resides in Boulder CO, where he also helps manage his extended family's ranch in the high-country mountains of western Boulder County.