Approximate transformation of an arbitrary curved surface into a plane using dynamic programming (Q2277758)

The authors outline a method to model a curved surface by small triangular patches that can be mapped onto plane triangles with small enough error. They consider this as a stress problem and the total stress replaces curvature and leads to a minimization problem for total stress. The procedure is in two steps, coarse and fine approximation. \{There seems to be no algorithm proposed to determine the number of subdivisions to be introduced in a coarse cell, and hence no dependence on curvature properties that could significantly reduce the number of finite elements necessary.\}