AOTD – gnuPlot
Monday, July 14th, 2008Today, I’m featuring gnuPlot. gnuPlot is a windows and Linux application to make 2D and 3D graphs of different styles. It’s a great application. The only downside is the non graphical user interface (except for the actual display of the graph). This means you have to learn how to use it’s feature rich language. This isn’t a big deal as most of it is common sense (i.e: f(x)=2*x; plot f(x);). Some of it, however, can be a bit more complex. Of course, if you want to do more complex things, you have to learn how to use more complex parts of the program.
Overall, it’s a very good and well written program, and I suggest it to anyone looking to make advanced graphs.
One of my projects a month ago was to use gnuPlot to create a 3D representation of the perlin noise function. A few hours later, and after learning how to use many of the more advanced mathematical routines in it’s built in function base, I accomplished this. Below, you can find the graph and the functions I used to display it.
