At any rate, I originally wrote in Ruby, but have been slowly porting it to C++ with high hopes for its use and applicability. I still have a bunch of interactive demos for numerical methods (from Newton’s method to the trapezoidal rule for numerical integration) in the Ruby version, but I’ll be bringing those to the C++ version one of these days. I started a sourceforge project for it a while ago, which was kind of exciting.

At any rate, as a brief (albeit nerdy) respite from the academic onslaught today, I added a class for parameterized curves.

A demo of a parameterized curve in openGLot

I’ve got a bunch more primitives to add to it (scalar and vector fields, for example), but those will surely come one of these days. I’ve added adaptive mesh refinement (so that “busier” functions require more sampling to get a more accurate visual representation), but I’m still not quite happy with it.

A "busy" function with no adaptive refinement

The same "busy" function with recursive refinement.

I’ve also got a 3D version, but that’s not been polished or formalized, but everyone loves a pretty graph:

Long story short, I’ve got something that’s not too terrible. Not perfect, but it’s certainly a start:

A few functions plotted with my grapher

But then, I thought, “why stop there?” I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to make a 3D version. While the 2D one will work on any generic function you give it, this 3D one has it hard-coded in right now. Of course, it wouldn’t be too much more to make it more flexible, but given that this took 30 minutes, I’m ok with its rigidity.

A simple surface.

We’ll see where this goes. It makes me feel a little nerdy that I’m two days into my winter break, and this is how I’ve spent some of it.