7 Sep 2010 15:15
Wandering the internet today, I stumbled upon pasta and mathematics. At the same time. Chris Tiee, a teaching assistant for one of UCSD’s vector calculus courses, had put into his class notes back in 2006 a short and very cute parametric equations quiz: match the parametric equations to the pasta shape. And he (or UCSD) conveniently left his notes on the web for posterity — or should I say pastarity?
His parametric equations were pretty basic — absolutely fine for a vector calculus quiz — and I thought I might be able to touch them up a bit. Here’s what I came up with for conchiglie rigati.
This exercise is also my excuse for finally getting MathJax up and running on my blog. [Update: I’ve disabled MathJax, because it mucks up non-LaTex posts that have $ characters. At some point I’ll figure out how to configure it amicably, but for now, the pastametric equations are provided as an image file.] You might find that this page loads slowly, and I don’t yet know if I can do anything about that. If you don’t see any equations below the picture, however, please let me know.
September 11th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
the beauty of mathematics
maybe that’s why i cried over my math homework……it was so beautiful.
December 18th, 2010 at 12:07 am
[…] few months ago, I posted a graph and parametric equations for conchiglie rigati. Today I’m sharing a graph and equations for cavatappi. As before, I started with equations from […]
July 10th, 2015 at 12:45 pm
[…] Mathematical blogger Steve Kass posted this image of a simulated conchiglie rigati: […]