Triangulating planar figures

As we saw in Chapter 3, Calculus and Differential Equations, we often need to break down a continuous region into smaller, simpler regions. In earlier recipes, we reduced an interval of real numbers into a collection of smaller intervals, each with a small length. This process is usually called discretization. In this chapter, we are working with two-dimensional figures, so we need a two-dimensional version of this process. For this, we’ll break a two-dimensional figure (in this recipe, a polygon) into a collection of smaller and simpler polygons. The simplest of all polygons are triangles, so this is a good place to start for two-dimensional discretization. The process of finding a collection of triangles that tiles a geometric figure is called triangulation.

In this recipe, we will learn how to triangulate a polygon (with a hole) using the Shapely package.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will need the NumPy package imported as np, the...