I discovered drawing with trig functions when I was about 9 or 10 years old, with the help of Sinclair ZX Spectrum, its version of the programming language BASIC, and its gloriously nerdy instruction manual. I soon happened upon the Curlicue fractal, really giving me a glimpse into the magic of maths – totally unexpected complexity arising from simple instructions.
In my teens, I taught myself to program in C, using the version of the language built into Autodesk Animator Pro (POCO) and spent many hours making mathematically-generated animations. Later, I learned Java and started making the animations interactive.
These are a few of my mathematical stills, mostly from the early 2000s. There are more images in this Flickr gallery. I used to have a lot more of my interactive mathematical toys online, but Java fell out of use as a browser plugin many years ago, and I haven’t converted them all into JavaScript, but here are a couple:
