There is more of the relationship between Multivariable Calculus and the food that we consume in our daily lives than we usually think! For our project, we created four different shapes of pasta in Mathematica which demonstrates how technology can present a variety of shapes that we encounter in our lives. We were both interested in how mathematics applies to the geometry of pasta. There are dozens of different pasta shapes to pick from, but we chose cannelloni, macaroni, spaghetti, and fusilli. These pastas offered a variety of geometrical shapes, while not being too difficult to graph.
Cannelloni is a cylindrically shaped pasta. We graphed a basic cylinder shape in Mathematica using a parametric equation. We used the same equation for the Spaghetti but made the radius much smaller and filled in the shape. Macaroni is a half-torus-shaped pasta that is generated by revolving a circle in a three- dimensional space about an axis that is coplanar with the circle, like a donut shape but in half. Fusilli-shaped pasta looks similar to a spring or spiral shape. All these varieties of shapes helped us plot our four favorite kinds of pastas on Mathematica.
