Patterns

Pattern

I’m always surprised at what comes out of my screen when I’m playing with some ideas. As long as I remove the axis of the plot and the context, it becomes art.

 

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Art from math

Occasionally my computer produces plots that can be fun to just post in the absence of context. Then they become artistic.

 
Here is a sample from one that I generated today while trying to understand something related to my current research.

This graph will never be published. At least not in one of my research papers in physics. Hence I publish it in my blog.

 

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A slight change of perspective

It’s always nice to celebrate when classes are over for the quarter. But the spring quarter is special. When it is over it gives me a change of perspective and I can look forward to more free time to do research for the summer. The change also signals that most committee work is also on hold until the fall.

Just to celebrate I have added a picture of the beach below. This picture was taken recently from my phone at a beach.

Picture of the beach

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More blobs of goop

I thought I would share another view of the data I’m analyzing

3D visualization

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Coloring graphs.

Coloring scheme I.

Coloring scheme II.

At the top you can see two different frames for visualizations of information during different times of a particular simulation. I’m not going to tell you the details of the simulation, nor what the graphs are going to represent (this is still in the ‘top secret’ category: it is work in progress and a lot of stuff can change before we decide to go public with this). In the meantime enjoy the pretty pictures. What I’m trying to figure out is which color scheme looks better. Warning: don’t expect to see graphs like this in any of my papers in the near future.

Here is the deal: coloring schemes produce emotions in the recipient. Different coloring schemes give people different feelings about information. For example, red is usually associated to hot, while blue is associated to cool. However, a blue star is hotter than a red star. The red/blue association is probably due to fire/ice. Fire tends to be reddish, and ice is kind of bluish, but when we see things according to the radiated energy at different frequencies we get a completely different picture.

When presenting scientific information, choices like this one often present themselves. And it makes a difference on how the recipient audiences perceive the quality of the work… or even better: the coolness factor of the work.

The big questions are: what emotions do the above graphs give you? Which one do you like best? Why?

In the end they are conveying sufficiently similar raw information, but though I know this is true, I feel different about it. They have a different artistic feel to them. I just thought I’d share some of these issues and maybe even get some feedback.

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Finding pretty patterns in scientific graphs

Here is a graph I produced today as I was studying some problems I’m interested in. The important thing is not what the graph represents physically: it’s just a bunch of trajectories in a Hamiltonian system. What is interesting is that the patterns look pretty and seem to have meaning.

Trajectories in a dynamical system

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