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This is not a bird (or a moustache)

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Submitted by Marianne on 8 January, 2015

Our image of the week may look like a bird in flight...

Image by Hamid Naderi Yeganeh.

...but it’s actually a collection of points in the plane given by a mathematical formula. To be precise, it’s a subset of the complex plane consisting of points of the form

  \[ \lambda A(t)+(1-\lambda )B(t), \]    

where

  \[ A(t)= 3(\sin (t))^{3}- \frac{3i}{4}\cos (4t) \]    

and

  \[ B(t)= \frac{3}{2}(\sin (t))^{5} - \frac{i}{2}\cos (3t) \]    

for $0\leq t \leq 2\pi $ and $0\leq \lambda \leq 1.$

The image was created by Hamid Naderi Yeganeh. You can see more of Hamid's images on this website and on the American Mathematical Society website.

See here to find out more about the complex plane and here to see previous images of the week.

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