Waves

Today’s math-art is a blast from the past. Waves was created by Matthias Wandel about a decade back, using QuickBasic 4.5. Although there are no complicated mathematical concepts behind this, this simple geometry was generated with almost pure algebraic math. The source code was:

FOR theta = 0 TO 4 * 3.1415 STEP .004
xt = SIN(theta * 10) * 230 + 320
yt = COS(theta * 9.5) * 200 + 240
nthet = xt / 30 + yt / 30
yp = yt + SIN(nthet) * 20
xp = xt + COS(nthet) * 20
LINE -(xp, yp)
NEXT theta

When contacted, Matthias told me,

Man, technology sure has come a ways, even since I put up that page. I might render it on the fly in Flash nowadays.
When I did it originally, all I had was 640×480 on my 286 PC. It took several seconds to render each one of these.

It’s good, at times, to step back into the past, and admire what we’ve come to today. Computational power has obviously increased, and even the most complex chaotic stuff like breather surfaces and strange attractors can be visualized quite quickly. Today, we step back in history, and feature Matthias’ art, to both admire the simplicity of the times, and to recounter our progress in technology.