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The Beauty of Parametric Curves - Overview

Author(s): 
Barbara Kaskosz (Univ. of Rhode Island)

The application presented in this article consists of two components: a Flash applet that provides a gallery of visually compelling parametric families and a general parametric families plotter. The plotter allows one to graph an arbitrary family of parametric curves and to find families that are appealing to include in your customized gallery.

Creating a custom gallery requires only simple editing of an XML file. We explain the process in detail in the pdf guide included in the zip package. We include in the zip package all Flash source code files ('fla' and 'as'files) as well, although these are not needed to create a custom gallery.

The application presented in this article stemmed from an ActionScript 3 tutorial at our site http://www.flashandmath.com. The applications uses custom AS3 classes by Doug Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz published in the archived MathDL Flash Forum article, Flash Tools for Developers: Graphing Curves in the Plane.

The applications here require the Flash 9 Player plugin, available free for most browsers from Adobe.

Barbara Kaskosz (Univ. of Rhode Island), "The Beauty of Parametric Curves - Overview," Convergence (February 2010), DOI:10.4169/loci002635