butterfly curve

Temple Fay discovered this complicated curve in 1989. It can be defined either parametrically or as a polar equation; I did it the former way.

One application I thought of for this is object motion in games: I tried it out by writing this little Canvas game, where the comets follow the curve's trajectory. The differences in plot density along the curve create natural-looking comet tails.

bézier curves

De Casteljau's algorithm is a fast, numerically stable way to rasterize Bézier curves. This code implements an interactive demo: click to append nodes to the curve's defining polygon, and drag any node to alter the curve.

convex hulls

This code demonstrates the Graham scan, an O(n log n) method for finding the convex hull (smallest enclosing polygon) of a planar point set. It's a great example of exploiting order: it works by sorting the set by angle about a known extreme point, allowing the hull points to be found in linear time.

A variation on the algorithm, noted by A.M. Andrew, sorts the set lexicographically and finds the upper and lower hull chains separately. This 'monotone chain' version is often preferred, since it's easier to do robustly.

segment intersection search

Here's a simple method I learned from Gareth Rees for finding the intersection (or parallel / collinear status) of two line segments. Rees credits Ronald Goldman, though I'd imagine the technique goes further back.

triangle geometry

Here's a trivial post, mostly just to show off how nice mathematical code can look in Haskell. It illustrates the centroid, incircle, and circumcircle of a random triangle, with everything defined in terms of vertex triples. The viewport centers on the circumcenter, and the triangle's interior is filled using barycentric coordinates.