Electrifying Field of Art

This stunning image won first place in the annual 8.02 "Weird Fields" contest at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It is a computer-generated visualization of an electromagnetic field.

John Belcher, who teaches an electricity and magnetism course at MIT, has developed a computer applet that his students plug their homework in to see what the solutions look like.

The contest is meant to encourage the students to play around with the equations that describe electromagnetic fields.  This year's winner was George Zaidan, with his equations:

g(x,y) = sin(x*cos(y)-y*cos(x))
h(x,y) = tan(x)

Other visualizations and interactive material are available at the course website.

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-- LiveScience Staff

Credit: George Zaidan