I have a tale of three images. Here is the first:

Lemming Dive

This, god help us all, is an animation I programmed in Maple for my Linear Algebra class back in the spring of 2002. The point of that assignment was to demonstrate knowledge of matrix transformations. I had no idea at the time that my world would eventually revolve around matrix transformations. This is because I had no idea I was going to end up in computer graphics.

Probably the single quirkiest choice of my very quirky education career was to take Calc 3 almost seven years after Calc 2. My rationale at the time was that I'd been working as a programmer for a couple years, I'd had my fun in the city, and I was ready to start thinking seriously about my education again. Both the Applied Math and the Computer Science departments of the Johns Hopkins Part-time Engineering Program offered simulation modeling courses that interested me because they were related to my work in policy research, but the Applied Math program had only two undergraduate prerequisites (Calc 3 and Linear Algebra), whereas the Computer Science program had three (Data Structures, Discrete Math, and some systems course). So I went the math route.

As fate would have it, that didn't last long, and I ended up in computer science anyway. But those math classes turned out to be more useful than I would ever have dreamed.

Here is the second image:

I did that using SuperPaint on my family's first Mac when I was fourteen. All those individual feathers hogged up every bit of SuperPaint's available RAM. Moving a wing generated a lag time of several seconds. I could only work in black in white. Even gray was really dithered black and white.

There was also no World Wide Web back then, at least not as we know it. I had the Mac application HyperCard, which sort of did similar things. I got pretty good at HyperCard scripting. I even tried to use HyperCard for keyframe animation. But not surprisingly, I didn't get very far and eventually lost interest.

Fast-forward now to the Linear Algebra class, which I happened to take at Marymount University. I was browsing the Marymount University bookstore one day, when I happened to notice that that a student license for Photoshop cost only $300, not $900 like the regular version. So I bought my own registered copy on the spur of the moment.

That was how I got back into computer graphics. I'd been drawing and painting using traditional media for a long time, but as it so happens, I didn't work digitally again until after the math classes.

And here is my third image, from my first graphics programming class a year later, in fall 2003:

CS 185 Applet

It's a very simple scene, just three raytraced spheres with three diffuse lights. The math is no more complicated than calculating the intersection of a line and a sphere. But there's an eerie beauty to it. From that moment on, I was hooked. (9/1/04)