Proseminar II: Mathematical Drawings in MetaPost, SS 07

Michael Joswig, Fachbereich Mathematik, TU Darmstadt.

Time/location: SE2: 16.15-17.55 (S215/301). We will meet for the first time on Monday, April 23.

MetaPost

This seminar is about the programming language MetaPost which is used to produce highy quality drawings of mathematical content (and many other things). To get an idea browse the links below.

• The MetaPost page of John Hobby, creator of the MetaPost language
• There is a teriffic French site with loads of material and further links. In particular, take a look at their examples.

For this course there is a maximum admittance of 12 participants, which will be asked to form up to six teams of two (or three) students each. I will give an introduction to MetaPost in the first few sessions. Subsequent sessions will comprise presentations of the teams for previously assigned tasks. The seminar will be held in English.

Examples and Such

As a first introduction I recommend André Heck's Learning MetaPost By Doing.

• Center of gravity in a triangle, [mp] [pdf].
• Bezier curve with points of control, [mp] [pdf].

Commands to work with MetaPost on the department's computers

• xedit (or vi, emacs, xemacs, ...) to write and edit text files (e.g. "xedit my.mp")
• mpost to produce an (encapsulated) postscript from the MetaPost code (e.g. "mpost my.mp"). Produces a file my.1, provided that "beginfig(1)" is used in the MetaPost code.
• ps2pdf to produce a pdf file (e.g. "mptopdf my.1 my.pdf")
• acroread (or xpdf) to view the pdf file (e.g. "acroread my.pdf")

Topics and References

• Peano Curves [Steffen Aland and Sascha Räsch]
  • Wikipedia: space-filling curve
  see also the references to the topic "Fractal Curves"
• Fractal Curves [Fazley Rabbi Chowdhury, Tim Grasser, and Nikolas Poniros]
  • Wikipedia: fractal
  • Learning MetaPost By Doing, Exercise 31
  • Galeries MetaPost: L-Systems
• Circle Inversion [Anita Liebenau and Melanie Markert]
  • Figures pour un cours (Jean-Michel Sarlat): Inversion
• Tesselations [Martina Stoynova, Ruben Straube, and Clara Thöne]
  • Wikipedia: tesselation
  • Galeries MetaPost: Tableaux d'Escher
• Drawing in 3D [Jens Sauer and Sascha Schünemann]
  • Learning MetaPost By Doing, page 54