Hello World, from MathPaint! (Preview)

If you’ve been following Mathaesthetics posts you’ve seen a variety of images shared – different types of generated art from fractals to repeated 2D plots to vector fields and scalar fields and more.

All images on this blog are created by our flagship software product, which has been in development since November 2019. Today for the first time I’m publicly sharing some screenshots of the user-interface, starting with a few document windows:

Hello World, from MathPaint!

These MathPaint documents were used to create our app icon and current Facebook cover.

MathPaint is a Mac OS desktop application written in Swift. A private beta release is planned for February 2020, and the completed 1.0 application will be released later this year, through the Apple AppStore.

CoreImage effects can be applied to any MathPaint canvas

I’ve always felt that creativity and mathematics belong together. MathPaint is designed for creative professionals who would like to harness of of the endless generative capability of mathematics to create visual forms, patterns, textures, and algorithmic art. You don’t need to be a programmer to create such designs with MathPaint, and the release will include visual templates and presets that are intuitive to browse and modify, plus cool automation features:

The “Repeater” feature can add multiple iterated re-renderings to a model

I also think MathPaint is a natural tool for students. While there are robust software products for mathematical modeling and computation, MathPaint focuses on aesthetics and uniquely permits the creative impulse to guide mathematical learning and exploration.

I will be using MathPaint to make art, and I hope to see a community of makers who create original expressive work with this software. Even algorithmic artists used to coding may find some rewarding features and workflows with this tool.

Document settings give you a page-layout app’s control over your math-art canvas.

Now that the first screenshots are out, look for weekly updates and posts on MathPaint progress! And of course, a continuing stream of art, including our Fractal Friday posts, all made by MathPaint.