## Thursday, December 27, 2012

### Heart-shaped Watt's curve

In some parts of Europe, you can find sensible, pragmatic governments which hold long term views about where their future prosperity may lie, while the area is going through a severe crisis and tough international - I should be more specific, intercontinental - competition threatens Europe's long term wealth, quite often implicitly taken for granted... This seems to be the case in France where the political class (overwhelmingly foreign to any sort of business) and the media fill the airwaves and the internet fibers with a discourse very often quite disconnected from reality. I sometimes wonder how so much individual talent and imagination and inspiration can aggregate to such a poor, short-sighted, conventional, boring public debate.. But I digress !..

So, some governments want to attract more young girls to a science/engineering curriculum, because they think that half of the population should take part, and shape tomorrow's industries.

My tiny contribution towards this (I believe sensible) goal is the following Watt's curve, which I designed so that it resembles an enticing heart

The curve is defined in the complex plane. With Wikipedia notations, it the heart-shaped Watt's curve polar equation is:
${ r }^{ 2 }={ b }^{ 2 }-\left[ asin\theta +\sqrt { { c }^{ 2 }-{ a }^{ 2 }{ cos }^{ 2 }\theta } \right]$
with
$a=0.48\quad b=1\quad c=0.5$

Most will probably find it cheesy. Some may even find it sexist. But I insist I meant no harm, just a small delicacy.

The Mathematica code to create this animated gif is in this github repo.