GNU Octave

Three-dimensional plotting

Equations (3.4) and (3.5) define two mathematical functions that are more complicated to visualize and plot compared to the simple polynomials in the previous section. Equation (3.4) is a scalar function that depends on two variables. The graph of such a function can be visualized via a surface plot. Equation (3.5) is a vector valued function and can be plotted as a parametric curve in a three-dimensional space. In this section, we shall see how to do this.

Surface plot

Let us start by making a surface plot of the graph of Equation (3.4) in the interval x ∈ [–2; 2] and y ∈ [–2; 2]. Since we work with discrete points,we need to evaluate the range of f for all different combinations (x₁y₁), (x₂y₁),...(x_ny_n). To do this in ...