Fun with Spirographs

A spirograph is a toy for making interesting and mesmerizing curves. The most simple configuration consists of two gears of different sizes. The smaller gear has holes for a pen and is rotated inside the larger gear.

The Wikipedia article goes into more detail about a spirogarph’s design and mathematical basis.

The interactive module below lets you explore how modifying the gear sizes and the location of the pen changes the resulting curve.

The source code of the spirograph can be found here: https://gist.github.com/tg2648/ca14e0678249d88df53292cfd2516d5b