Who cares?

Who cares?

Did you enjoy playing with the pictures? Is there some importance to making pretty pictures besides the recreational aspect?

The cliché "a picture is worth a thousand words" has a lot of truth to it, because many (most?) people are visual thinkers. If you shake a calculus teacher awake at three o'clock in the morning and demand, "Define a hyperboloid of one sheet," you probably will not get a very coherent answer. If instead you say, "Describe the surface with equation x² + 3y² - 5z² = 1," you may get a slightly more intelligible response. But you will probably be most satisfied if you give Maple the command

with(plots):
implicitplot3d( x^2+3*y^2-5*z^2=1,
  x=-2..2, y=-2..2, z=-2..2, orientation=[30,70],
  grid=[10,10,20], scaling=constrained);

to produce the figure.

The Math 696 course pages were last modified April 5, 2005.
These pages are copyright © 1995-2005 by Harold P. Boas. All rights reserved.
 

Who cares?