Our group took on the task of designing a snow woman, Cindy. On our poster, you can see our friend Cindy standing near two Christmas trees with angels on top of them. Through the use of Mathematica, we came up with mathematical formulas to create different parts of Cindy. Cindy’s body was created with the formula for spheres. Spheres were also used for the eyes, mouthpieces, and buttons on Cindy. The hands and arms of Cindy were created through the use of the formula of cylinders. The neck of Cindy’s scarf was also created by the formula of a cylinder. The other parts of the scarf were created by manipulating the formula of a cylinder. Cindy’s hat is made by the formula of a hemisphere and the formula of a disk. The formula of a cone was used for Cindy’s nose. We found specific coordinates on the same plane to put Cindy together, by adding or subtracting values from the function equations we were able to move the shapes across the plane to piece her together.
Similarly, the two trees that Cindy is standing between were made with the formulas of a cone and cylinder (The trees’ stumps were created by cylinders while the tops of the trees were created with cones). The angels on top of the trees were created with truncated cones (in that the top was not a closed point), spheres, and half-disks expertly placed in order to portray our desired image. It took a lot of guesswork, trials, and manipulation, but after the first couple of moving parts we became more skilled in using Mathematica to create images from functions.
