Robert Woodley

Statement

I don't feel I've achieved understanding of a mathematical concept until I have coded an implementation of it. When programming a visual rendering of the mathematical entity, it is impossible to gloss over poorly understood areas, each nuance must be completely elaborated. Recently I have been working with spherical photos and videos and have found that this media allows one to easily build intuitive explorations of the field of Complex Analysis. Previous work has repurposed the artifacts of PCA-based face detection algorithms. I've also built some educational STEAM applications and believe strongly in the possibility of interactive simulations as a road to intuitive understanding.

Films

Domain coloring is a visualization technique useful in Complex Analysis. In this case however, instead of a color wheel or grid, the domain coloring comes from a spherical video of a robot driving in a circle. By associating the sphere of the video with the Riemann sphere, the robot's path intuitively demonstrates the behavior of the zeros and poles of various complex polynomials. Written using WebGL and Three.js.