Shape Your Heart
Did you set a fire on Valentine’s Day?
When we are young we always hope there is someone willing to hold our hands, protect our hearts to the end of the world. But later on we learned that happiness is all about our internal moods and the development of any relationship is more related to commitment, rather than romantic. So let’s calm down from the fire and look our hearts in a more logical way.
The heart symbol can be traced to before the last Ice Age. Cro-Magnon hunters in Europe use the symbol in pictograms, but the meaning is unclear. The symbol become universal during the Middle Ages. The Egyptians believe the heart is the center of life and morality. Ancient Greeks think heart is the center of the soul. Ancient Mexico believes that every human being contains several different spiritual forces, and heart is associated with teyolia, the spiritual force remains with the body all the time. Christian theology takes the image of heart importantly, as a symbol for Jesus Christ and his love. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart reaches a high point in the Middle Ages, where it is seen in works of art and is mentioned constantly in prayers and doctrine. It remains an icon even today.” Timeline: Heart in History
Mathematics also have their way to celebrate Valentine’s Day. On 2010’s Valentine’s day, Eric Weissten shows us how to generate heart curves on Wolfram Alpha:
3D heart surface was given by Gabriel Taubin’s paper An Accurate Algorithm for Rasterizing Algebra Curves. “Rasterizing an algebraic curve means to determine which cells, or pixels, from a square mesh of cells in the plane, are cut by a curve represented as the set of zeros of a polynomial in two variables.” I built a online music visualization demo (image on the top) based on his heart surface. I rendered the heart shape by cutting it into 3 dimensions x, y and z, and rendered all the points inside the surface with some level random variance. Changing the camera distance based on beat detection. You can drop your music into the canvas and see how this heart beating based on your music. Enjoy!
“We must cultivate our garden.” — Voltaire “and shape our hearts.” — Yanling.
