As someone who grew up in Buffalo, I love snow. While most of the people I talk to don't share my level of excitement for snowfall, I think most of us do enjoy certain aspects of snow, from the beauty of a single snowflake to the appearance and quiet of a landscape blanketed in uniform white.
But we can also inject a certain amount of mathematical and scientific thinking into this enjoyment. For example, at least since Kepler, scientists have been exploring the reasons behind the geometric shapes of snowflakes. So when it recently snowed I began thinking about how to simulate snow falling. This is not a new preoccupation of mine. In fact, one of the first programming tasks I attempted to tackle many years ago was making a snowfall screensaver.
Well, this time, using Processing, along with some simple algorithms informed by some randomness, you can quite easily get something that looks like snowfall. And it takes fewer than 75 lines of code:
Happy Winter!
Top image:Philip Tellis/Flickr/CC
