The University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) began requiring all incoming freshmen in computer science and engineering disciplines to purchase hand-held computers in the Fall of 2001. This article describes how the initiative was implemented and the effects it had on the structure of the teaching and learning environment at UMD. Special attention is paid to its impact on library concerns and the evolution of the relationship between hand-held computers and electronic reference material.

We use the technique of divide-and-conquer to construct a rectilinear Steiner minimal tree on a set of sites in the plane. A well-known optimal algorithm for this problem by Dreyfus and Wagner [lo] is used to solve the problem in the base case. The run time of our optimal algorithm is probabilistic in nature: for all E > 0, there exists b > 0 such that Prob[T(n) < ] > 1 -E , for n sites uniformly distributed on a rectangle. The key fact in the run-time argument is the existence of probable bounds on the number of edges of an optimal tree crossing our subdivision lines. We can test these bounds in low-degree polynomial time for any given set of sites. 0 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.z b 6 log n

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Abstract. The Delaunay diaorarn on a set of points in the plane, called sites, is the straight-line dual graph of the Voronoi diagram. When no degeneracies are present, the Delaunay diagram is a triangulation of the sites, called the Delaunay triangulation. When degeneracies are present, edges must be added to the Delaunay diagram to obtain a Delaunay triangulation. In this paper we describe an optimal O(n log n) plane-sweep algorithm for computing a Delaunay triangulation on a possibly degenerate set of sites in the plane under the L 1 metric or the Lo~ metric.

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