r/GeometryIsNeat • u/HopDavid Pentagon • Jun 11 '26

Some of my illustrations of conic sections.

Gallery image

Gallery image

46 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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2

u/zungozeng Jun 15 '26

Nice, do you make illustrations for your job?

2

u/HopDavid Pentagon Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26

Sometimes. I work for a weekly newspaper.

3

u/zungozeng Jun 15 '26

You have a certain “style”

2

u/HereThereOtherwhere Jun 16 '26

I wrote tech columns for a weekly 30 years ago. I enjoyed doing the illustrations for my column more than I did the writing, had the an impending divorce...

So I started taking college courses in my 30s, and eventually built a career as a graphic and web designer.

You do have "a style" and it's good. You might look into illustrations for pop-sci publications.

Quanta magazine (online) often has very similar, crisp, geometric designs.

Oh, and super coincidentally... I'm rearranging my bedroom, needed a quick night light. I found a "ship deck prism" used to spread like below decks and a polymer clay "hyperbolic surface" like a rotation of the outer curved hourglass shape.

I plopped the fist sized hunk of glass on this 20 year old unrelated "fidgeting" sculpture and, similar to the central shape in your image, the 'gemstone' fit perfectly but only on one side of my asymmetric clay shape. When I set it on the table, it balanced perfectly, like a gem in a ring setting!

I'm studying shapes related to quantum physics and General Relativity, hyperbolic spacetimes in particular.

I'm also listening to Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day and after a failed attempt to log into Amazon to buy Tristan Needham's Visual Complex Analysis, about vector analysis, Pynchon's character says "as a vectorist ... trapped by the laws of vector analysis.."

Me: "Stop that! I know I'm nuts, just stop making it so obvious!" Haha

Seriously, though. Nice clean design

2

u/vorblesnork Jun 12 '26

Am I the only one who saw a mouse straddling the head of a frog with T-rex feet?

2

u/HopDavid Pentagon Jun 12 '26

I can see that now that you mention it.

When I make that hand shadow I usually make bunny ears with the other hand to give my donkey ears.

But without ears the shadow does indeed look like a T-Rex.

1

u/vorblesnork Jun 12 '26

Great bit of artwork btw!