Now, on to the topic at hand.

I would like to tell you a story about a blind physicist. It is not strictly a true story, but it is a plausible one.

In school, this person demonstrated an excellent aptitude for the abstract mechanics of mathematics, and (s)he could use those tools to advance his/her thought on theoretical physics.

But, years later, visual computing became the standard tool for the theoretical laboratory. There is merit in this practise, but it causes certain difficulties for our blind scientist.

To continue for a moment on the merits of visualization, an image concretizes abstraction. It casts the abstraction into a form accessible to the realm of the senses. It allows the problem to be seen from a different point of view.

Breakthroughs in science and mathematics -- quantum leaps in understanding have occurred due to visualization in scientific computing.