Riemann surfaces naturally appear in the analysis of complex functions that are branched over the complex plane. However, they usually possess a complicated topology and are thus hard to understand. We present an algorithm for constructing Riemann surfaces as meshes in R3 from explicitly given branch points with corresponding branch indices. The constructed surfaces cover the complex plane by the canonical
projection onto R2 and can therefore be considered as multivalued graphs
over the plane – hence they provide a comprehensible visualization of the
topological structure. Complex functions are elegantly visualized using domain coloring on
a subset of C. By applying domain coloring to the automatically constructed Riemann surface models, we generalize this approach to deal with functions which cannot be entirely visualized in the complex plane.
Lifted Domain Colorings
(2009)
Complex-valued functions are fundamental objects in complex analysis, algebra, differential geometry and in many other areas such as numerical mathematics and physics. Visualizing complex functions is a non-trivial task since maps between two-dimensional spaces are involved whose graph would be an unhandy submanifold
in four-dimensional space. The present paper improves the technique of “domain coloring” in several aspects: First, we lift domain coloring from the complex plane to branched Riemann surfaces, which are essentially the
correct domain for most complex functions. Second, we extend domain coloring to the visualization of general 2-valued maps on surfaces. As an application of such general maps we visualize the Gauss map of surfaces as domain colored plots and establish a link to current surface parametrization techniques and texture maps. Third, we adjust the color pattern in domain and in image space to produce higher quality domain colorings. The new color schemes specifically enhance the display of singularities, symmetries and path integrals, and give better qualitative measures of the complex map.