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"Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together."
- Ray Bradbury

Geometric Modeling  
  The first recorded use of geometric figures to directly represent, or model, living beings.  

Certainly, Swift was not the first to think about living beings in geometric terms; Renaissance artists probably claim the prize there. But to actually build up an image of a person, say, with geometric figures alone?

The knowledge I had in mathematics, gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed in the king’s kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his majesty’s table.
Technovelgy from Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift.
Published by Benjamin Motte in 1726
Additional resources -

If you are interested in the topic, you might want to check out the Online Geometric Modeling Notes, courtesy of our friends at UC Davis. There, you will learn about NURBS (non-uniform rational b-splines) and more.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Gulliver's Travels
  More Ideas and Technology by Jonathan Swift
  Tech news articles related to Gulliver's Travels
  Tech news articles related to works by Jonathan Swift

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