Gwendolyn Fischer

Very nice, and faster than my implementation. However, there's an error somewhere in there. Try plugging the following triangle and point in:

tri=[-0.351987256452018,-2.20321765626083,2.02537449847930;-1.63376366769586,1.51438594345573,0.862041724660671;-0.688413485634898,-1.58953522933881,-1.14541245917166];
p=[1.38048000996529,3.61393939643154,3.46074586955261];

[tridist,tripoint]=pointTriangleDistance(tri,p);
tridist
norm(p-tripoint)

output:
tridist =
    6.1630
ans =
    4.4997

But tridist should be the same as the norm from the initial point to the closest point (output from the function as PP0). Plotting it, it looks like PP0 is getting to the right spot, so there must be an issue with that particular path through the code. Notice that if you truncate the values I gave above, the correct answer is reached (i.e. if you only use 4 places past the decimal).

Using R2010a