Mathematics Animated

Louis A. Talman

Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Metropolitan State College of Denver

The objects below are QuickTime animations; they should work on Macintosh computers or on Windoze boxes that have QuickTime installed. If you don't have QuickTime, you can get the latest version at Apple's QuickTime site.
This page has proved to be much more popular than I could ever have imagined that it would, and I've heard complaints from several sources that it includes little or no explanation of what the animations illustrate. My original intent was that knowlegeable instructors would use the movies with their students; of course, such instructors would already know what was going on and would provide their own explanations. However, to my amazement and gratification, many more people other than instructors appear to have found something (or things) that they like here--so explanations may now be needed. Over the next few months, I will try to add some.

Bill Emerson, Brad Kline, and I gave an MAA Minicourse in creating and exporting animations like these to the Web at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans during January of 2001 and in San Diego during January of 2002. Bill and I also gave a workshop at the Spring 2002 meeting of the Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA in Laramie, WY, in April of 2002. We're always happy to discuss these techniques. Write.

You can save these animations to your hard drive. Performance may improve when you run them from copies stored on your own hard drive. Select "Save As" from your browser's "File" menu. Set the format to "Source" and then save to your hard drive. This will work for machines that don't have QuickTime installed, and you can transfer the resulting .MOV file to another machine that does, using either a floppy or a Zip disk.

At first, I made animations available in a large format (generally 432 pixels square) and a small one (320 pixels square or smaller and--sometimes--with a lower frame rate). So many of the later ones failed to fit into the original square formats, that I've pretty much abandoned the original sizes. But many of the animations appear in a large format and in a small one. The smaller format is for lower-resolution screens and to improve download times.

If you found this page through a web search engine, you may be looking at a copy that your search service cached. In that case, you may not be seeing the page as it currently exists. So you may want to visit Mathematics Animated.

I've received some reports of non-functioning animations. If you encounter one, please let me know.

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

This page was last updated on January 20, 2007.