By "recreational," I just mean that I know some math and like to do it, but am not an academic or full-time teacher.
But yes, examples are games like Go and Chess, puzzles like the ones in the WSJ's Varsity Math, Sudoku, and writing programs to generate these:
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In that case we have something in common.
I've been thinking of taking Mandelbrot and Julia set generation programs like that and throwing them into Unity. Could easily generate a heightmap and from that fully 3D exploreable images like that. However, it'd be difficult to do that including zooming. Though it could be done.
EDIT: If you get bored... check it out. Unity is free to use. It's pretty awesome too. You can use C#, a hybrid java, or a variant on python (called Boo). I recommend C# for Unity.
Let me know if you need any help if you are interested. :)
I am by no means a mathematician or exceptional at much other than counting in binary but codeacademy has helped a bunch. I have been able to play around with Javascript, Ruby, Python designing apps and build your own adventure platforms with my friends. Its free and educational! :)
Don't discount those accomplishments. For some fields I believe if a person has the desire and self-motivation the information is out there and they can easily learn the same things they would learn at a university. The problem is to do it truly well you need a lot of passion and self motivation since you don't have someone you are paying you telling you that you must turn something in. On the flip side those people that did it on their own are often FAR MORE skilled at it as they had to be truly passionate about the topic to make it that far. Some of the best programmers and IT people I've worked with were that way DESPITE the college or lack of college education. There are some fields that do require a university as we can't really do some things without access to really expensive and specialized equipment, and resources. I believe you can be a brilliant programmer, mathematician or both without going to a University if you have the drive and will to do so. I don't consider myself particularly skilled at math. I am great at the math I have a purpose for, and other parts of math I didn't put to use so they have atrophied to almost non-existence. It is also the fact that I may not have ever learned some maths that would truly have helped me. So I am ignorant. I am a decent and eccentric programmer though, so I managed to code fractals despite some of the crazy math involved. I could look at the code and understand what it was doing better than I could look at the math. I'd like to rectify that but I kind of doubt I will at this stage. Though ya never know... stranger things have happened.
Does @hmfoucault have anything to do with Foucault's Pendulum?
EDIT: you may have to reply to your own post, or to mine... though the only way I'll know you replied to your own is if you put @dwinblood somewhere in it to let me know. I like to talk so I run into this nesting limit at least once a day. :)
Cool, thanks! I've never used Unity, but I've seen 3D images before and liked them, so I'll check it out and let you know what happens.
I've made some Mandelbrot and Julia sets with Java and with BASIC in the past. Made one where you can move the cursor around and see the Julia set corresponding to each point on the Mandelbrot set. :D
I was going to ask you what language you used to do those. Last time I made a mandelbrot program (a few years ago) I wrote them in C. I made some videos... they were not as smooth and fancy as people that put a lot of time into it. :)
I thought about making my own number system using strings so I could do higher precision floating point. It'd be SLOW but the problem with the sets I'm sure you know is you can only zoom in so far before your float or double can no longer keep track of it. I think it'd be neat to keep zooming. That'd be really slow though :)
I guess it's been longer than I thought. I made the last program one day and two videos the next day. I've been meaning to play with 3D versions of that. Wonder if that'd make for an interesting blog.