Tom Beddard of subblue created this nifty little Flash application where you can draw your own mathematical butterfly:
Taken from Clifford Pickover's book, Computers and the Imagination, is this experiment that creates butterfly like curves.
The formula is expressed in polar coordinates as:
By changing the A, B, a, b and c parameters you can get some nice results.
It's fun to change the parameters to see what you get: Link - via Cliff Pickover's Reality Carnival
Must be twenty years since that book was published and I still have my original copy somewhere. I coded just about everything I could from it. Some of it took a very long time to render on the old 386SX I was using at the time. Still enjoyed every last bit of it though. Good to see people are still inspired by it.
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