NURBS(Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines)

Source：http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NURBS

Development of NURBS began in the 1950s by engineers who were in need of a mathematically precise representation of freeform surfaces like those used for ship hulls, aerospace exterior surfaces, and car bodies, which could be exactly reproduced whenever technically needed. Prior representations of this kind of surface only existed as a single physical model created by a designer.
NURBS的發展始於1950年代，它是由需要像在車體和船殼中使用的自由曲面的數學上的精確表示的工程師們所發現的，它可以在任何技術上需要的時候精確的複製出來。以前這類曲面的表示只存在於設計者創建的實體模型。

The pioneers of this development were Pierre Bézier who worked as an engineer at Renault, and Paul de Casteljau who worked at Citroën, both in France. Bézier worked nearly parallel to de Casteljau, neither knowing about the work of the other. But because Bézier published the results of his work, the average computer graphics user today recognizes splines — which are represented with control points lying off the curve itself — as Bézier splines, while de Casteljau’s name is only known and used for the algorithms he developed to evaluate parametric surfaces. In the 1960s it became clear that non-uniform, rational B-splines are a generalization of Bézier splines, which can be regarded as uniform, non-rational B-splines.
該發展的先驅包括：皮埃爾·貝茲（Pierre Bézier）， 他曾是Renault的工程師，以及Paul de Casteljau，他在Peugeot工作，兩個都是法國人。貝茲基本是和de Casteljau獨立發展的，兩人互相不知道對方的工作。但是因為貝茲發表了他的工作的結果，今天的一般的計算機圖形學用戶認為樣條 -- 通過在曲線上的控制點表示的那類 - 為貝茲樣條，而de Casteljau的名字僅作為他為計算參數化曲面所設計的演算法而為人所知。在1960年代，人們認識到非均勻有理基本樣條是貝茲曲線的一個推廣，而貝茲曲線可以視為非均勻有理B樣條。