Some mathematical art

This evening I ran across a paper on an unusual coordinate system that creates interesting graphs based from simple functions. It's called circular coordinates," but this doesn't mean polar coordinates; it's more complicated than that. [1]

Here's a plot reproduced from [1], with some color added (the default colors matplotlib uses for multiple plots).

The plot above was based on a the gamma function. Here are a few plots replacing the gamma function with another function.

Here's x/sin(x):

Here's x⁵:

And here's tan(x):

Here's how the plots were created. For a given function f, plot the parametric curves given by

See [1] for what this has to do with circles and coordinates.

The plots based on a function g(x) are given by setting f(x) = g(x) + c where c = -10, -9, -8, ..., 10.

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[1] Elliot Tanis and Lee Kuivinen, Circular Coordinates and Computer Drawn Designs. Mathematics Magazine. Vol 52 No 3. May, 1979.

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