A Ripple of Ripples

Sophia Wood

31 Jan 2025 • 1 min read

One thing I love about math and art is the conversations and iterations that flow from their patterns and beauty. After posting Walking Ripples, I have enjoyed seeing how the simplicity of shading circles propagates in conversation, art, and exploration.
Here are just a few of the follow-up activities, responses, iterations, and play that I have seen or been a part of since. Please share if you have any other explorations with overlapping circles. I am grateful for everyone sharing their creative endeavors and ways in which they think - thank you!

Rachel Ehrlich (A Joy of Randomness) made an amazing pen plotter algorithm using repeated symmetric differences.

green ink pen plotter intersection of circles — Rachel Ehrlich's pen plotter output

At the Recurse Center, we (J, Basil, Gil, and I) had a shader jam and made this. The insight, ideas, iteration, and collaboration was so much fun.

A wonderful chalkdust article was shared on Mathstodon by Colin the Mathmo
After sharing a rough desmos implementation of the post on BlueSky, Eli Luberoff shared an implementation with some "shenanigans" showing just how powerful Desmos is as a creative tool :

Joe Crawford made this wonderful sketch:

I quilted the concept:

A quilt of overlapping circles with turquoise and blue/white that forms a sine wave flowing down with various sized circles

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