I'm going to be the ambassador for the embarrassed math illiterate among us and ask: what's the process for coming up with a function who's graph is a specific image?

One possible process for this particular one:

I want to draw a heart symbol. It's symmetric, so I can compose of two identical by mirrored halves. So I need a function that looks like half a heart. Hey, that kind of looks like a parable sliced off just so...

After that, it's pretty straightforward mechanical work and a little inspiration to give the whole thing volume by overlaying a sine wave with it.

it seems there are many tricks you can use: check out the first reply here () (explaining the batman equation)

() http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/54506/is-this-batman...

If this were an extremetech.com article, the headline would be, "Scientists Discover The Formula For Love".

If anyone would like to see more functions, I've been updating a list of awesome ones to try here: http://www.webgl.com/2012/03/webgl-demo-google-search-3d-gra...

Hi,

I think you should link back to HN (that is, if you used any of the equations from HN, not from somewhere else). :)

If you get a message saying WebGL isn't supported in chrome go to chrome://flags/ and enable 'Override software rendering list' and relaunch chrome.

Wow. I didn't know Google drew graphs too; does this feature come with an API? That would be cool.

dup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3778633

This isn't about google's new graphing ability, it's about the function 5 + (-sqrt(1-x^2-(y-abs(x))^2))cos(30((1-x^2-(y-abs(x))^2))) and the graph this function produces.

Check the 10th link in that comment... It's exactly what this post draws!

♥

Awwwww.