Periodic functions as art

I came across this interesting piece of art by Paul Brand at the Norwegian Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. Vials are evenly arranged on a circle, and each vial contains a different amount of blue liquid.

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This is essentially a visualization of a periodic function with a period of . The liquid level in each vial represents the function value at that particular polar coordinate, .

Note the larger difference in liquid level between the top-most vial and the vial to the left of it. This suggests that the artist may have chosen a discontinuous -periodic function to visualize here. But, in reality, the behavior of the function is unknown between each vial with this visualization strategy.

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