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In case you didn't know, Wolfram has a "demonstrations" website:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/
You need the "Mathematica Player" to run these... or you can just watch
the animated Flash demo.
Now, I have to say, when I heard about this I was extremely
enthusiastic. But if you actually browse the list of demonstrations and
try a few, you rapidly discover something: Almost all of them are
ground-breakingly boring. I mean, seriously, this stuff makes
mathematics seem like the most boring thing imaginable!
Most of the demonstrations only allow you to adjust a tiny, tiny number
of parameters, so if you've seen the screenshot, you've basically
already seen everything worth seeing. The ones that do have lots of
parameters mostly have parameters for changing the colours or the line
thickness or something - rather than changing the actual mathematics of
the thing you're trying to draw! Almost all of the descriptions consist
of one, maybe two sentences. You've got to just sort of *guess* what's
being demonstrated, or what the "r" and "f" sliders do.
But then, this is a public site that anybody can submit demonstrations
to. It's not produced by professionals, this is amature content. And
that means that you get a small number of utter gems, burried deep
within layer upon layer of useless crap.
A bit like YouTube.
Anyway, after a long, *long* time browsing, I found these:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CausticsOnSplineCurves/
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/CatacausticsGeneratedByAPointSource/
Unfortunately, as with most demonstrations, the resolution drops way,
way down while you're manipulating it, and then goes back up to full.
Damn, somebody needs to raytrace this or something! o_O
This demo here also answers a few of my questions about B-splines:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/BSplineCurveWithKnots/
I'll let you know if I manage to find any other non-lame demonstrations...
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