My younger son is studying trig right now and I thought it would be fun for him to play around with some 3d curves made with trig functions.
I showed him how to use Mathematica’s ParametricPlot3D[] function and then just let him make some shapes on his own. He settled on a curve that looked like this:
Here’s the code just in case it is not legible in the video:
After he made the curve we printed it – it was really fun to see him working on the print when it was finished. I wish the picture was better!
When everything was finished I asked him to tell me about the curve. I’d not seen the code before and didn’t know there was a stray Cos[x] in it. Talking about that piece of the code led to a great conversation about elementary trig functions (totally by accident!):
Finally, I had him talk about the 3d printed shape:
I really enjoyed this project today – it is fun to use 3d printing to explore so many different areas of math.
Mike's Math Page 