Reaction-Diffusion
Reaction + diffusion is a common combination of phenomena studied by chemical engineers, which could be described by these equations:
“where u and v are the concentrations of hypothetical factors, f and g are the reaction kinetics and Du and Dv are the hypothetical diffusion coefficients … for u and v, respectively” (source).
When studied for petrochemical applications, reaction-diffusion might as well be not very entertaining, but the matter takes a different perspective when it is studied to model the skin pattern of animals…
Source: SHIGERU KONDO, MOTOKO IWASHITA and MOTOOMI YAMAGUCHI “How animals get their skin patterns: fish pigment pattern as a live Turing wave” Int. J. Dev. Biol. 53: 851-856 (2009)
or when they are put in action to create art (generative 3-D design) which can be 3-D printed using fast prototyping machines – such as these lamps by the Nervous System duet:
Don’t miss the image-rich blog and website, which shows some equation-based artwork created with surface subdivision algorithms also employed by certain amoeboid protozoa, particle systems composed of meshes of springs and Diffusion-Limited Aggregation (DLA).
This supposedly inspirational post pairs with the previous Modeling and gaming, which contaminates fluid dynamics with the computer games and motion pictures special effect business.