Martin Heller

1953

Martin Heller is a geoinformatics specialist who wrote the cave-survey program Toporobot. His Eternal Braid, made with his own hidden-surface program, won first prize in the 1984 computer graphics competition of the Munich weekly Computerwoche, and his Stars and Stripes won second.

Full Bio

Martin Heller of Riehen, near Basel, is a geoinformatics specialist who wrote the cave-survey program Toporobot. He began exploring caves at about age twelve, and by his own account he started programming on calculators in 1968. The caving club SGH Basel dates Toporobot to 1977, when he began writing it to map and visualize cave passages, starting with the Hölloch.

The folder of the 1984 computer graphics competition held by Computerwoche, a computer weekly in Munich, contains three sheets by Heller. He made Eternal Braid with Invisikalk, his own hidden-surface program first written to make pictures of limestone caves, and his statement calls the pictures test objects for a new visibility algorithm. The jury gave Eternal Braid first prize, worth 3,000 marks, and Stars and Stripes second prize, worth 2,000 marks.