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Not your usual animated GIFs

The GIF file has been around for a long long time (Graphics Interchange Format) and it is possible to stack GIFs together into one file that plays an animation like an on-screen flip-book. Here is a page of animated GIFs that are really beautiful. They are from MathWorld - a part of Wolfram Research who publishes the exquisite Mathematica program. One example:

The "witch of Agnesi" is a curve studied by Maria Agnesi in 1748 in her book Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (the first surviving mathematical work written by a woman). The curve is also known as cubique d'Agnesi or agnésienne, and had been studied earlier by Fermat and Guido Grandi in 1703. The name "witch" derives from a mistranslation of the term averisera ("versed sine curve," from the Latin vertere, "to turn") in the original work as avversiera ("witch" or "wife of the devil") in an 1801 translation of the work by Cambridge Lucasian Professor of Mathematics John Colson (Gray).

Posted by DaveH at March 1, 2005 6:54 PM