Flash Mathographics

October 21st 2008 Posted to Actionscript 3, Math
While I was in Singapore I found a cool book that talks about various Math graphics theories called Mathographics. It also contains sample code written in BASIC. On the flight home I started translating some of these into AS3. The only bad part about the book is that the author leaves a lot of the work to you when it comes to trying to reproduce his graphics. Maybe I’m just spoiled by Flash books where you always have full source code available. Despite that I had a great time building some cool looking graphics, especially from the section regarding spirals.

The images above are just a sampling of the graphics I was able to create. You can download a ZIP file containing both the FLA and SWF files. By modifying the symbols used to draw the shapes you can create some really wild effects. The example below is one of my favorites and is an example of a daisy using Fermat’s spiral formula. Click on the image below to see an animated version.

This is definitely a nice book if you want to get more into generative math art. I’m surprised I haven’t seen more books like this.

Lee

21 Comments

Comments

  1. hebchop
    October 21st, 2008 | 2:48 pm

    awesome thanks Lee! Mucho kudos go out to any author willing to share code. Another good book featuring a lot of the usual suspects is this; http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590594290

    It’s about time they came out with another (as3?) edition isn’t it?

  2. Fern
    October 21st, 2008 | 2:49 pm

    Great stuff! THX Lee :)

  3. Willem
    October 21st, 2008 | 5:15 pm

    Hey, this is superb information. Thank you so much.
    It reminds me of a mention made on artfromcode.com of another obscure book from the ancient past, which proved very interesting, too.
    Great stuff.

  4. jerry
    October 21st, 2008 | 6:41 pm

    good for study~ thanks you for your share

  5. Andrea
    October 21st, 2008 | 11:04 pm

    Good staff Lee. Thank you!

  6. polyGeek
    October 21st, 2008 | 11:24 pm

    Thanks for the tip. I bought the book. Too bad Amazon.com doesn’t sell time. I need to buy some to read this book now. :-)

  7. Shoom
    October 22nd, 2008 | 12:38 am

    Great! How hard would it be to add some animation to it?

  8. Joris
    October 22nd, 2008 | 1:12 am

    Very good find..I was looking for something like this for a while! Thanks

  9. Anton
    October 22nd, 2008 | 1:49 am

    Thanks for the info! Cool stuff!

  10. Lawrie
    October 22nd, 2008 | 2:09 am

    Nice work Lee.
    I’m a big fan of the book “Flash Math Creativity” mentioned above. I read it a couple of years ago and ended up making this – http://lawriecape.co.uk/mathflash/content.html
    (Which seems to run far too fast in FP10!)
    and this -
    http://lawriecape.co.uk/mathgame/

  11. Daniel
    October 22nd, 2008 | 4:45 am

    Looks very interesting, thanks for the tip Lee!

  12. Jim Almeida
    October 22nd, 2008 | 9:38 am

    Funny I was just going to post the Flash Math Creativity comment – guess hebchop beat me to it…

    Here is the link to Flash Math Creativity 1 & 2 incase anyone is interested though. Great books!!

    http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590591852
    http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590594290

    Nice work Lee -

  13. The Flash Blog » Acrobat animation with Fermat spiral
    October 22nd, 2008 | 12:00 pm

    [...] is another little experiment I whipped up using Fermat’s spiral formula. It takes the the Acrobat logo [...]

  14. George Profenza
    October 22nd, 2008 | 3:17 pm

    Cool book, and the similar results Amazon brings up are quite interesting as well.

    I’ve started tinkering with Geometry a bit in Processing lately:

    http://flash.quietroot.org/labs/processing/rotorelief/

    Thanks for the link, good stuff.

  15. Richard Morey
    October 23rd, 2008 | 11:17 am

    I played around with some of these FLAs and made a three frame movie so that you can see the spirals being drawn. If anyone wants a copy send m an e-mail: rwmorey71[at]hotmail.com.

    Rich

  16. Jason Fletcher
    October 24th, 2008 | 5:37 pm

    Exciting to see other explore recursion in other ways! Tasty stuff.

    Here is a way to bring ANY graphic into flash and control its recursion attributes.

    Examples:
    http://www.recursiveidea.com/CYBER/IDEAS/Recursion_Excursion/flash/SCREENSHOTS/fav/favs.htm

    Flash:
    http://www.recursiveidea.com/CYBER/IDEAS/Recursion_Excursion/flash.htm

    Home:
    http://recursiveidea.com/CYBER/IDEAS/Recursion_Excursion/main_page.htm

  17. KsuKsu
    October 29th, 2008 | 1:32 am

    ? ???? ????? ? ????????? ????? ??????????, ?? ? ???? ???? ????????? ? ?????? ????? ? ?????? ???????? ?? ?????????? ????!

  18. Mathographic Eggs | BIT-101 Blog
    November 4th, 2008 | 6:04 am

    [...] Brimelow mentioned recently that he had picked up this book while in [...]

  19. i-create | therefore-i am » Blog Archive » PaperVision3D RSS Reader Alpha
    November 15th, 2008 | 2:28 am

    [...] Posts: Flash Mathographics gSkinner Flash Audio Demo Powered by Bookmarkify™ Posted in [...]

  20. Mensah
    March 3rd, 2009 | 3:38 am

    Thanks, Lee! I saw Natzke’s awesome, AS-based prints this past Summer in Chicago. Truly inspiring! Thanks.

    M

  21. Jawn
    December 25th, 2009 | 6:32 am

    I got the book, and I love it! Thanks Lee. I should have fun with this.

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