Mathematica pasta recipes

Posted: June 5th, 2011 | Author: Sol | Filed under: Art, Fun | 1 Comment »

One day, while surfing the web for people doing interesting things with Mathematica, I discovered Sander Huisman’s blog. Sander is a PhD candidate in Applied Physics in the Netherlands. He also does some interesting things with Mathematica.

My first experience of Sander’s work was the post “Random hopping,” which inspired me to write some Mathematica code to do a random walk on an equilateral triangle, following the rule he described, to generate a Sierpinski triangle which I showed off in Friday Fun #1 and in 3D at Friday Fun #2.

I noticed another post of Sander’s, Pasta visualization.

More than a year ago, I plotted a whole bunch of pastas, using Mathematica. It was more like a challenge; can I plot the weirdest pastas in a couple of lines? And indeed most of the pastas could be visualized in less than 5 lines.

He shared one example of Mathematica pasta. I wanted to see and share the rest of the “whole bunch.” So, I wrote to Sander and he provided me with a notebook containing thirteen different kinds of pasta and he gave me permission to share the recipes. Wow!

Here’s the notebook.

Here’s the one small bit of initialization code for the pasta recipes.

Here are the recipes.

Fusilli

Casarecce

Farfalle

Macaroni

Spaghetti

Cellentani

Mezzi Rigatoni

Bucatini

Gemelli

Penne

Anelli

Stelline

Gnocchi

Can you come up with other pasta recipes? There are plenty of kinds of pasta at Wikipedia to choose from. If you do come up with new recipes email them to me at sol dot lederman at gmail dot come and I’ll feature them in the blog.

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