Denys Fisher Denys Fisher Denys Fisher (11 May 1918 – 17 September 2002) was an English engineer who invented the spirograph toy and created the company Denys Fisher Toys. He left Leeds University to join the family firm, Kingfisher (Lubrication) Ltd. In 1960 he left the firm to set up his own company, Denys Fisher Engineering, in Leeds. In 1961 the company won a contract with NATO to supply springs and precision components for its 20 mm cannon. Between 1962 and 1964 he developed various drawing machines from Meccano pieces, eventually producing a prototype Spirograph. Patented in 16 countries, it went on
Upward planar drawing Upward planar drawing In graph drawing, an upward planar drawing of a directed acyclic graph is an embedding of the graph into the Euclidean plane, in which the edges are represented as non-crossing monotonic upwards curves. That is, the curve representing each edge should have the property that every horizontal line intersects it in at most one point, and no two edges may intersect except at a shared endpoint. In this sense, it is the ideal case for layered graph drawing, a style of graph drawing in which edges are monotonic curves that may cross, but in which crossings are