Hello, Yes, this is the pixel problem, it is caused by the square grid of the image made of pixels. For example, when you draw lines that are close together on a pixel screen you get also Moiré patterns, http://www.plouffe.fr/simon/distributions%20modulo%201/imagepages/image50.ht... Now the image of the sunflower and the Moiré is a mixed effect between the natural occuring spirals and the 'closeness' of the points which causes the pattern, and of course : what is the formula or name of this pattern is a good question, Best regards, Simon Plouffe Le 22/03/2012 07:08, James Propp a écrit :
Back in September my friend Joshua Burton sent me this email. He and I and our mutual friend Michael Larsen exchanged a few emails about the phenomenon, but we never followed up:
http://www.cs.uml.edu/~jpropp/sunflowers.html
(I'm sending the URL because one of the imbedded images is quite large.)
I asked Josh if it was okay to share this problem with others, and he replied: "By all means, share! The first to-do, I think, is to redo the work independently of the Mma engine, to confirm that the moire patterns are real, and not artifacts of some tool-specific rounding issue. If it's real, I guess the next thing is to come up with some numerical measure of the anomalous behavior of a big sunflower, as a function of N. That, or an actual clue what's going on."
Jim Propp _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun