A first love, requited
A while back I enrolled in a program called Netmath at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It was late 2001 when I had to withdraw; my job looked as though it would be swallowed in the "dot bomb" earthquake and the assignments were taking longer than I could put in. It was one of the saddest moments of my life - I sold out a personal passion to keep a job I hated. 
The silver lining was the tool that the course used - a very powerful program called Mathematica. Mathematica not only functions as a super powered calculator, it also changes the method that you learn Calculus. I managed to keep Mathematica and occasionally I still play with it. On my way out the door I brought some resources with me to South Dakota to be my friends for the week. I was looking at graphing multi-variable equations on 3 dimmensions and made a few examples [on the left]. You will notice that most of the leg work is done by the Plot3D function, and ranges are supplied for both variables in the equation. Pretty, no?
Here you can see another example of a multi-variable equation being plotted, however instead of a 3 dimmensional plot it is a Contour plot which illustrates values as different shades of color.
There are many people who hate math because of the way that it's taught to them: a rigorous teacher who isn't interested in explaining 'why' things are the way they are or (more often) a teacher who is afraid to go beyond what they know and admit their shortcomings. If you ask me, math is beautiful - it illustrates a natural order of things. Some people aren't given to conceptually thinking these things as beautiful when they are expressed in values like pi but they would be very keen on graphics like the ones I've put in this entry. Indeed, sometimes formulating things spatially will give a bigger edge to those that think so over those that don't.
While I'm being candid I may as well say that the more time I spend learning computer related technie, the more I yearn for the type of knowledge that is constant and has multi-disciplinary application. Learning a new programming environment like the .NET Framework is exciting in some ways but so temporary.
At least I still have Mathematica, and Netmath is still around. I'll get back to them one day, I promise.
6:03:54 PM 
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