This is not really a game or graphics topic per se, though it does have some connections to implicit modeling. I’ve seen a bunch of blog posts, tweets, G+ posts, etc. about something that seems to have been dubbed the batquation. It’s an equation that is supposed to look like the batman logo when graphed. I’ve tried to track down the original source, but have not had much luck (if you know, let me know!). Sadly many of the posts about this use a low-resolution thumbnail of the photo or a zoom on the graph, so you can’t actually read the equation itself. Here’s one of the better versions I’ve found:
A word on how this seems to have been constructed: It’s symmetric in x, so use |x| everywhere. Each term is responsible for one part of the logo:
Find a function f, where f(x,y)=0 is the right shape for one of the curved segments. Everything except the sides of the wings are of the simple form f(x,y)=g(x)-y or y=g(x). For example, the first term is responsible for the sides of the wings. Without the square roots, that term looks like this:
That gives you the segment, but also stuff outside of it you don’t want. So find a function h(x,y) that’s positive in the area where f(x,y) should apply and negative where it shouldn’t. Then |h|/h is a nice step function, 1 where h is positive and -1 where h is negative. Take the square root of that, and now it’s 1 where h is positive and imaginary (actually i) where h is negative. Use that to limit the scope of f(x,y) to the region of interest. The wings actually have two of these trimming functions, one in x and one in y (shown in color where each is imaginary)
The trimmed version (where the entire first term = 0) looks like this:
Repeat for each segment. Multiply all of those segments together, and you get a function that’s zero along the batman logo and non-zero everywhere else.
A bunch of the posts and stories on this are of the form “this is cool, does anyone have a graphing calculator to check it out”. Thanks to the nasty numerical properties of the trimming terms (with values 1, 0/0 and i), Mathematica has trouble at at the edges of those terms. I cheated here by explicitly excluding the imaginary regions, but this is what it’s raw un-tweaked output looks like:
I’m not sure a graphing calculator would cut it, but cool none the less.