Site to graph out strings and characters

September 5, 2010 5:58 PM

I'm looking for a site that will take a string of characters, like a name, and provide an equation that, when mathematically graphed out, draw out that string of characters on the graph.
posted by duende to computers & internet (4 answers total)

The Inverse Graphing Calculator? (via)
posted by Rhaomi at 6:16 PM on September 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

potrace is a piece of software that will take a raster image (like a .gif or .jpeg) and transform it into an outline tracing, which is a parametric function of a sort in that it's a list of points in 2D space. If you want something like a Taylor polynomial as the function output that's a bit more complicated and I don't know of software or a site which does this, offhand. (Although Rhaomi's link does something along those lines but it doesn't look like a Taylor polynomial.)
posted by XMLicious at 6:25 PM on September 5, 2010

Do you want this for some practical purpose? Or more as a curiosity? You're not going to get anything reasonably looking which will plot out to something legible.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:29 AM on September 6, 2010

More specifically, given n points, you can solve for an n-1 degree polynomial's coefficients by substituting the points, but you will also get a lot of other points which aren't part of your intended curve.
posted by Obscure Reference at 5:33 AM on September 6, 2010