» A Little Processing #
I wanted a visual representation of the usual continued
fraction expansion of the irrational number e that
used concentric rings to represent the successive anapests of the tail
of the expansion; with grouping added for emphasis:
2, 1,1,2, 1,1,4, 1,1,6, ...
The first ring would have four sectors; the second would have six, the third eight, etc. Something like this:
The question was how to get it drawn, and after a little thought, I settled on writing a Processing program to generate the image. The language doesn't include a primitive for drawing sectors, but it's possible to represent a second as a larger filled arc and then a smaller filled arc that covers the same angle but filled with background color:
fill(foreground); arc(x0,y0,r1,r1,theta0,theta1); fill(background); arc(x0,y0,r0,r0,theta0,theta1);
Or, in my case, just stacking up pie charts with the smallest on top is sufficient. The source is here.
