I have a growing set of circles (and locations for those circles), each step I add one. I also need the smallest circle that contains all of the circles in my set. I found the wikipedia page about the smallest-circle problem and it states that there is a linear-time recursive algorithm that solves this, which would be perfect for my problem. The page however does not give the algorithm, and I couldn't find it either.
So my first question is, what's this smallest-circle algorithm called? Secondly, my problem is a little more complex, because I have circles rather than points. So any ideas on how it could be adapted to work with circles?
The problem is called Smallest enclosing ball of balls.
For code, see miniball and CGAL.
The code mentioned above works in general dimension. There may be something simpler for dimension 2.