Finding interior points

One problem with working with two-dimensional figures in a programming environment is that you can’t possibly store all the points that lie within the figure. Instead, we usually store far fewer points that represent the figure in some way. In most cases, this will be a number of points (connected by lines) that describe the boundary of the figure. This is efficient in terms of memory and makes it easy to visualize them on screen using Matplotlib patches, for example. However, this approach makes it more difficult to determine whether a point or another figure lies within a given figure. This is a crucial question in many geometric problems.

In this recipe, we will learn how to represent geometric figures and determine whether a point lies within a figure or not.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will need to import the matplotlib package (as a whole) as mpl and the pyplot module as plt:

import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as...