Learning Math from a new perspective

I've always wanted to learn how computers draw stuff in the screen. In my early days, the path that I chose to try to draw something was trough HTML and CSS, and that took me very far, as what I wanted to show was mostly good position and responsive design. But when I tried to create something more complex, like a moving particle system to recreate a confetti effect, just those two were not enough.

That's how I discovered p5.js and consequently Processing, and that was a game changer. I felt I could do anything with it, and I did. I created a lot of cool stuff, like multiple 3D rotating cube making a wave, a beautiful recursive tree and the particle system I wanted. All thanks to Dan Schiffman and his amazing tutorials.

But I wanted to go deeper. I wanted to know how the computer actually draws stuff in the screen. That's when I discovered GLSL. GLSL is a language that is used to write shaders, which are small programs that run in the GPU. I started learning it by following The Book of Shaders, and I was amazed by how much I was learning about math.

I was learning about vectors, matrices, trigonometry, and a lot of other stuff that I thought I would never use again. But now I was using it to draw a triangle in the screen. And that was amazing. I was learning math again, but from a new perspective. I was learning math to create art, and that was beautiful.

I'm still learning GLSL, and now I'm relearning math. A lot of things that I saw in Calculus and Linear Algebra are now being used to appear shapes in the screen. Like parametric equations, that I thought I would never use again, are now being used to create beautiful animations.