Show HN: A Sierpinski Valentine in 4 equations
desmos.com
desmos.com
Disclosure: I'm one of the engineers at Desmos.
Desmos works best on your version of Android if you use the Chrome Browser.
(Close page in Aurora, no clue what "Desmos" is but I don't care by now)
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkx1aKv2z8o Specifically from 4:30 to 7~
Without any mathematical knowledge, you probably couldn't come up with something like the s(i,k,o) function (which, as far as I can tell from just looking/playing around with them briefly, seems to be the function responsible for the tessellation offset), and you might not have thought to define a system like (x=X(N,t), y=Y(N,t), 0<t<1).
Without a nontrivial amount of playing around, you probably wouldn't have found the exact constants used, like (2pi(3^i)), .2/(2^i), etc.--but knowing how altering those affects the end result takes some mathematical knowledge, so it's more guided investigation than random guessing.
Here's a fun intermediate step (circles instead of hearts), with a few of the numbers parametrized as sliders:
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/irg4qa2s4h
[disclaimer: I work at desmos]