The Mathematica Programmer

Minimal Surfaces

Volume 2, Issue 2
1992

Minimal surfaces have a strange beauty and an amazing variety of shapes. We investigate a simple formula that can produce an infinite number of minimal surfaces. This topic provides a good illustration of the combination of symbolic computation, numerical evaluation, and graphics within Mathematica. Symbolic simplification is necessary to find analytic continuations of the multivalued functions used to describe the surfaces. We use animation to show the continuous transformation of one surface into another.