Ever wondered about parametric equations? They’re a slightly different take on your classic functions of x and y in Euclidean space. Your ordinary equation y=x… gets expressed in terms of another variable. For linear equations this doesn’t make much difference, but for more complex equations, such as a circle – it actually makes things simpler. For a circle the graph x2 + y2 = 1 might be rearranged to be y = +/-sqrt(1 – x2) for drawing a graph. For a parameter version we change it to (sin(t), cos(t)) for a small range of t (+/- 2 PI), and drawing our graph just got a whole lot easier.
But what we’re really into is drawing graphs that represent this idea:
So this is based on some work by Curran Kelleher here. You can try it via Web Start here.
Equations to try:
(var-set x u) (var-set y v) (var-set z (sin (/ (* u v) 10))) (var-set x u) (var-set y v) (var-set z (* u (sin (/ (* u v) 20)))) (var-set x u) (var-set y v) (var-set z (sin u))
This presented some interesting challenges to package up. I have a greater respect for Zach Tellman and his work on Penumbra in terms of neat packaging of jogl libraries.
I got the JOGL libraries from here and here. I packaged the libraries up for leiningen using this. The only trick after that was ripping out all the other jar signatures and making sure they all had mine. (Manual process)