Mandalas Colored

Apriétame bien la mano, que un lucero se me escapa entre los dedos (Coda Flamenca, Extremoduro)

I have the privilege of being teacher at ESTALMAT, a project run by Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences that tries to detect, guide and stimulate in a continuous way, along two courses, the exceptional mathematical talent of students of 12-13 years old. Some weeks ago I gave a class there about the importance of programming. I tried to convince them that learning R or Python is a good investment that always pays off; It will make them enjoy more of mathematics as well as to see things with their own eyes. The main part of my class was a workshop about Voronoi tesselations in R. We started drawing points on a circle and we finished drawing mandalas like these ones. You can find the details of the workshop here (in Spanish). It was a wonderful experience to see the faces of the students while generating their own mandalas.

In that case all mandalas were empty, ready to be printed and coloured as my 7 years old daughter does. In this experiment I colour them. These are the changes I have done to my  previous code:

  • Remove external segments which intersects the boundary of the enclosing
    rectangle
  • Convert the tesselation into a list of polygons with tile.list function
  • Use colourlovers package to fill the polygons with beautiful colour palettes

This is an example of the result:


Changing three simple parameters (iter, points and radius) you can obtain completely different images (clicking on any image you can see its full size version):

You can find details of these parameters in my previous post. I cannot resist to place more examples:

You can find the code here. Enjoy.

4 thoughts on “Mandalas Colored

  1. Great! I’ll draw mandalas with my daughter – maybe she can be more interested in R after some fun!

    thank you!

    abraços!

    cassiano

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