Plotting Stewie Griffin from Family Guy

Plotting Stewie Griffin from Family Guy

Computer aided design gets ever more important in jobs – and with graphing software we can  create art using maths functions.  For example the above graph was created by a user, Kara Blanchard on Desmos.  You can see the original graph here, by clicking on each part of the function you can see which functions describe which parts of Stewie.  There are a total of 83 functions involved in this picture.  For example, the partial ellipse:

when x is bounded between 3.24 and 0.9, and y is bounded as less than 1.5 generates Stewie’s left cheek.  This is what he looks like without it:

By clicking on the various functions you can discover which ones are required to complete the full drawing.  Other artwork designed by users includes:

A minion from Despicable Me 

A sunflower:

And Hello Kitty:

See if you can create some designs of your own!  This could make an interesting maths investigation for anyone thinking about a career in computer design or art – as it is a field which will grow in importance in the coming years.

You might also like to look at a similar post on using Wolfram Alpha to plot the Batman and Superman logos.  

IB Revision

If you’re already thinking about your coursework then it’s probably also time to start planning some revision, either for the end of Year 12 school exams or Year 13 final exams. There’s a really great website that I would strongly recommend students use – you choose your subject (HL/SL/Studies if your exam is in 2020 or Applications/Analysis if your exam is in 2021), and then have the following resources:

The Questionbank takes you to a breakdown of each main subject area (e.g. Algebra, Calculus etc) and each area then has a number of graded questions. What I like about this is that you are given a difficulty rating, as well as a mark scheme and also a worked video tutorial.  Really useful!

The Practice Exams section takes you to ready made exams on each topic – again with worked solutions.  This also has some harder exams for those students aiming for 6s and 7s and the Past IB Exams section takes you to full video worked solutions to every question on every past paper – and you can also get a prediction exam for the upcoming year.

I would really recommend everyone making use of this – there is a mixture of a lot of free content as well as premium content so have a look and see what you think.