Most students think of mathematics as a very boring subject. As a mathematics student myself, I don’t think about this fact a something strange at all. Most school teachers only teach their students how to use a function to solve a problem. Perhaps it is something good if you life in the age of the Greek. But now is information age, you can use a computer to do that.

I believe that mathematics could be an interesting subjects to learn. School teachers only need to spend more time to learn how to give a life to the subject they teach.

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Who is not going to be tired seeing simple geometric object like a sphere or ellipse all the time. However the generalization of elliptic shape called super-ellipse is the foundation of a life-like mathematics equations. To construct the cat shape above, all you need is some understanding of super-ellipse, a little understanding of binary operations, the rule of products and transformation matrix.

The cat shaped equation above was made by putting together basic building blocks using the rule of products. Just like making complex structures from pieces of lego, we will need to move and rotate the building blocks around. That is when the transformation matrix come into play.

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Actually the cat shown above is not really my first piece of life-like mathematics equation. This elephant is my first creation. Creating the trunk was the hardest part since I didn’t have enough experience for rotating and translating the super-ellipses. I have to do that by trial and error. Nevertheless, this elephant is what most people in my university relate to my name.

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With this elephant, explaining about sinus and cosinus function is going to be more fun. It is possible to use those trigonometric functions to repeat the elephant pattern along a chosen axis. For the example above, I made the elephant pattern repeated along the x-axis. If your students ask for an example about the application of sinus and cosinus function, just give them the link to this article.

I believe for sure that mathematics is really a subject with a lot of life in it. Scientists and programmers today have used mathematic as the language with which they explain many kind of physical phenomenon around us. As mathematic teachers, we need to tell our students that mathematics is an interesting subject to learn and mathematics equations could be cute and adorable as well.

My other science and mathematic articles :

• Image of Four Dimensional Objects
• What Could Robots Do at This Moment?