This is about my printed models of mathematical objects.
All of the designs that I've published so far consist of grids of bent ‘rods’, and in most of them the spacing of vertices depends on the rod's local curvature; that's easy enough. But I think some of these figures would look better as continuous surfaces, and it's not obvious to me how to arrange the vertices efficiently — that is, to triangulate the surface just finely enough that it's accurate to within the printer's resolution.
So: given a surface defined by well-behaved functions $x(u,v), y(u,v), z(u,v)$, is there a standard way to choose vertices in $u,v$ space so that each edge length is roughly proportional to the radius of curvature in that direction?