About the Cover

Discovery 2012Tree, by Zhen James Xiang 2012 Ph.D. in electrical engineering

Second-place winner in Princeton’s 2011 Art of Science competition

The algorithm used here recursively cuts an image into smaller rectangular pieces. For each cut, a larger rectangle is divided either horizontally or vertically into two equal smaller rectangles. This results in a division of the input image into many rectangular pieces, similar to those shown, organized into a data structure called a dyadic tree.