Friday, April 15, 2016

Polar Coordinate Classic

In some sense, my first "Nested Tori" was a notebook which contained really cool plots and graphs. There's lots of old gems there worth posting and updating. Today, I bring you a nice polar plot. I was really intrigued by plots in polar coordinates, because it represented the first real departure from simply graphing $y=f(x)$. We instead (most commonly) write $r = f(\theta)$ where $r$ is distance from the origin and $\theta$ is counterclockwise angle, and let things get farther or closer as we go around. Without further ado, here is the famed butterfly (it does have a little post-warping afterward, though), which shows you that you don't need fancy-schmancy 3D stuff to still find great things:

$r = e^{\sin \theta} - 2 \cos(4\theta) +\sin^5\left(\dfrac{\theta-\frac{\pi}{2}}{12}\right), 0 \leq \theta \leq 24\pi$




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