AepGraph

My freshman year at the UW-Madison 1989-1990, I took accelerated Calculus. I was struggling with all of the algebra and so used my new Compaq 386s and the included line number basic programming language to create a program that enabled me to plot functions visually. At first the program could plot only 2D cartesian functions, but before the end of the year I added a basic 3D cartesian plotting ability although the plots were very slow.

After I had graduated from the U of C, I took up my graphing application again in 1995 and redeveloped it as a C++ Windows program. I, eventually, added polar, cylindrical, spherical and time dependent plots, while greatly improving the performance and accuracy of the plots. I also created a screen saver that would allow people to use plots they had created in AepGraph as their screen saver

In 1998, I published the application to the Internet attempting to sell it, however, this didn't go very well.

AepGraph is a fairly odd program. Very quickly, the focus of the program for me was about the visualization and aesthetics of the plots as opposed to utility. I have never added the ability to plot axies or label units or other such analytical features. The purpose of the application was to give a user an intuitive feel or understanding of a function. I would spend hours using the program to explore functions and scuplt images.

There are two ways that I use the program to scuplt images. The first way was to imagine some shape and then think about what the function would be to create that shape. This is quite a good exercising in getting oneself comfortable with working with functions. The other way, is to randomly type functions into AepGraph and see what pops up and then adjust it from there.