ABC’s Lissajous Curve

G’day. Today’s math art is Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC)’s logo. If you’re Australian, or reside in Australia, this logo would be familiar to you already.

If you’re not, ABC is Australia’s national public broadcaster. And modern day notable shows being broadcasted on ABC includes the awesome Chaser’s War on Everything (you know, the YouTube videos on stupid Americans were started by them) and Summer Heights High.

But what’s interesting about ABC in terms of math-art is that their logo is actually a lissajous curve. A lissajous curve is a graph of a complex harmonic motion equation. And what is interesting is that ABC, a media company (which is about as far away from mathematics as possible) using a mathematical image as its logo.

Well, this is because back in the old days, when broadcasting was more about technical issues than the actual content, engineers used a lissajous curve to tune their equipment. And ABC decided to use it as its logo.

If you want to generate your own ABC lissajous curve and is confused by Wikipedia’s generalized formula, here’s how to do it with any good graphic calculator that allows plotting of time variables (I suggest a program like Time and Space 3D - yes that’s a program I use mainly on a PDA)…

x = sin(3t); y = sin(t); t = time

You can read more about ABC’s decision to use a lissajous curve here (Shockwave needed).