A week or so ago I made an Easter egg in Mathematica and emailed around a bit to see if I could get other people to try it, too. I consulted with my family, dared readers of my blog to send me Mathematica eggs and mentioned my egg to my friend science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow, who blogged it on BoingBoing. I also spread the idea around Wolfram Research. As someone with a small collection of ornamental eggs in a glass case in my living room, I am quite pleased with the results. Here’s how it came about: My kids are enthusiastic celebrators of holidays. They want to start decorating for Halloween in August, and decorating for Christmas as soon as the pumpkins and spider webs come down. Last week, I had bought a carton of eggs and a package of egg dye, and kept finding my kindergartner getting out the eggs or the dye without permission. So I’d promised that Thursday, absolutely, we would begin work on eggs. I have a copy of Michael Trott’s The Mathematica GuideBook for Graphics, and on Thursday afternoon, my fifth-grader was flipping through it, looking at the pretty pictures. He saw a picture in it and asked if I could scan in and print out a picture like that on a sticker for him to put on an Easter egg. I decided he had a point there: that one could and should decorate eggs with Mathematica. The example he’d chosen was more elaborate than I was willing to take on in 3D, but I decided to see what I could do while we boiled the eggs. I looked for something to work from and found the Ellipsoid Demonstration on the Wolfram Demonstrations Site. I adapted from that, using the mathematical description of an egg shape from Jürgen Köller’s website as my guide to egginess.

As the project coordinator of the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, I have an inbox that is overflowing with fantastic ideas from Mathematica users and coworkers for how to make the Demonstrations site even more user-friendly and easy to navigate. One of the most exciting new features we’ve implemented recently is the new topics page. In a few easy clicks, users can fine-tune their searches to browse topics ranging from Middle School Mathematics to the Solar System to Natural Forms and everything in between.