A few years ago, I went to listen to Roger Nelsen who was giving a talk about copulas with fractal support. Roger is amazing when he gives a talk (I am also a huge fan of his books, and articles), and I really wanted to play with that concept ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Books written to teach a general purpose programming language are usually organized according to the features of the language and examples often show how a particular language feature is interpreted by a compiler. Books about domain specific languages are usually organized in a way that makes sense in the corresponding ... [Read more...]

For a quick recap, Pierre and I supervised a team project at Ensae last year, on a statistical critique of the abstract painting 1024 Colours by painter Gerhard Richter. The four students, Clémence Bonniot, Anne Degrave, Guillaume Roussellet and Astrid Tricaud, did an outstanding job. Here is a selection of ... [Read more...]

Here is how to improve your charts, graphs, maps, and plots: Erase non-data ink. Erase redundant data ink. Maximize the ratio of data to ink. Show data variation, not design variation. The surface area of graphical elements should be directly proportio... [Read more...]

Computer creations are perfect by design. We put in numbers, and if all goes well we get out an exact result. If we want a line, we want it perfectly straight. If we want a circle, it should conform to the platonic ideal of a circle. From a mathematical standpoint, ... [Read more...]

I have a few posts nearing completion, but meanwhile a weekend break for art. Big thanks to Simon Urbanek and Jeffrey Horner, creators of Cairo, a library for the programming language R. Have you noticed how R can’t anti-alias (fancy way for saying smooth out lines and curves when ... [Read more...]

I put together four of the best looking images generated by the code shown here: # More aRt par(bg="white") par(mar=c(0,0,0,0)) plot(c(0,1),c(0,1),col="white",pch=".",xlim=c(0,1),ylim=c(0,1)) iters = 500 for(i in 1:iters) { center = runif(2) size = 1/rbeta(2,1,3)   # Let's create random HTML-style colors color = sample(c(0:9,"... [Read more...]

As usual click on the image for a full-size version. Code: par(bg="black") par(mar=c(0,0,0,0)) plot(c(0,1),c(0,1),col="white",pch=".",xlim=c(0,1),ylim=c(0,1)) iters = 500 for(i in 1:iters) { center = runif(2) size = rbeta(2,1,50)   # Let's create random HTML-style colors color = sample(c(0:9,"A","B","C","D","E","F"),12,... [Read more...]