Sven Schönherr
Institut für Informatik
Freie Universität Berlin
Takustr. 9, D-14195 Berlin, Germany
email: sven@inf.fu-berlin.de
Report B 97-03
May 1997
The problem of finding the smallest enclosing ellipsoid of an n-point set P in d-space is an instance of convex programming and can be solved by general methods in time O(n) if the dimension is fixed. The problem-specific parts of these methods are encapsulated in \emph{primitive operations} that deal with subproblems of constant size. We derive explicit formulae for the primitive operations of Welzl's randomized method in dimension d=2. Compared to previous ones, these formulae are simpler and faster to evaluate, and they only contain rational expressions, allowing for an exact solution.
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