Here’s an image that came out of something I was working on this morning. I thought it might make an interesting border somewhere. The blue line is sin(x), the green line 0.7 sin(φ x), and the red line is their…
Blog Archives
R without Hadley Wickham
Tim Hopper asked on Twitter today: #rstats programming without @hadleywickham’s libraries is like ________ without _________. Some of the replies were: (skydiving, a parachute) (gouging your own eyes out, NULL) (dentistry, anesthesia) (shaving, a razor) (internet shopping, credit card) Clearly…
Interview with Michael Hammel, author of The Artist's Guide to GIMP
Michael J. Hammel is the author of The Artist’s Guide to GIMP, a book I reviewed three weeks ago. The following interview is based on my correspondence with Michael.
The Artist's Guide to GIMP
Learning how to edit images has been on my to-do list for a long time. I do some very basic editing with Paint.NET, but I keep meaning to learn to use GIMP. I heard years ago that GIMP is terribly…
The Book of Inkscape
When I first started using Inkscape, I read Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program by Tavmjong Bah, 3rd edition. It’s now in its 4th edition, which I have not seen. I received a copy of The Book of Inkscape…
Thoughts on the new Windows logo
I appreciate spare design, but the new Windows logo is just boring. Here’s the rationale for the new logo according to The Windows Blog: But if you look back to the origins of the logo you see that it really…
2010 calendar of lost mathematical art
Rod Carvalho wrote a post this morning announcing a beautiful 2010 calendar created by Ron Doerfler. Doerfler’s blog is entitled Dead Reckonings: Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences. The calendar is an example of such lost art. It is illustrated…
Including LaTeX in an Inkscape drawing
My previous post described how to include an Inkscape drawing in a LaTeX document. This post describes how to use LaTeX in an Inkscape drawing, which is probably more useful. The LaTeX output is included not as bitmap but as…
Including an Inkscape drawing in LaTeX
The Inkscape drawing package can export to a large variety of vector drawing formats, including LaTeX. If you save your drawing to a file foo.tex, you can include the file in a LaTeX document as follows. \documentclass{article} \usepackage{pstricks} \begin{document} Testing…
Function plots in Inkscape
Why would you want to plot a mathematical function using a drawing package like Inkscape rather than a mathematical package like Mathematica or R? One reason is that you may want plot for its visual properties. For example, you might…
Bezier basics
Bézier curves are very common in computer graphics. They also interesting mathematical properties. This post will give a quick introduction to Bézier curves, describing them first in visual terms and then in mathematical terms. There are different degrees of Bézier…
Same color illusion
Are squares A and B are the same color? I found this illusion on John Baez’s site. It was created by Edward Adelson in 1995 and is the subject of a Wikipedia article. Related post: Optical illusion, mathematical illusion
More on colors and grayscale
My previous post gave three algorithms for converting color to grayscale. This post gives more examples and details. The image below is a screenshot from an Excel spreadsheet illustrating color values and how the convert to grayscale. The R, G,…
Three algorithms for converting color to grayscale
How do you convert a color image to grayscale? If each color pixel is described by a triple (R, G, B) of intensities for red, green, and blue, how do you map that to a single number giving a grayscale…
Back to school
Here’s today’s image from The Retro Press, a back-to-school ad from the September 9, 1957 issue of LIFE. The Retro Press blog highlights advertisements from the Gallery of Graphic Design.
Posted in Graphics
