winding vertices

okay, I've done my best to scour the internet to find this information, but I keep ending up with stuff that isn't useful at all. I've tried to implement it myself, and I've got a start on it, maybe, but it involves 1440 (no typo) square roots, so I figure there must be a better way. So I turn to the board...I've got a list of vertices in object space, and a list of faces and which vertices they use. I need to sort the second list so that the verticies are in clockwise order when viewed from outside the object...I need to do this so the normals are all declared right. Basically, I need to be able to wind the points. But I haven't been able to find a way to do this on three dimensional coordinates...I got it on 2D ones, but that doesn't help too much, that's where all those square roots came in. So I'm curious...is there some sort of algorithm to help with winding, or some sort of theory behind it that I can implement in code? It's an easy thing for a human to do to look at an object and figure out what order clockwise is...so why can't I implement it? :confused: