Happy Springtime to all in the MaplePrimes Community! Though some in our community may not live in the northern hemisphere where flowers are beginning to bloom, many will be celebrating April holidays like Ramadan, Passover, and Easter.

One of my favorite springtime activities is decorating eggs. Today, the practice is typically associated with the Christian holiday of Easter. However, painted eggs have roots in many cultures.

For over 3,000 years, painting eggs has been a custom associated with the holiday of Nowruz, or Persian New Year, during the spring equinox. Furthermore, in the Bronze Age, decorated ostrich eggs were traded as luxury items across the Mediterranean and Northern Africa. Dipped eggs have also played an important role in the Jewish holiday of Passover since the 16th century.

To celebrate this tradition, I would like to invite all of the Maplesoft community to create a decorated egg of their own with the Easter Egg Art Maple Learn document. In this document, an ovoid egg equation is used to define the shape of an egg. 

The ovoid egg equation mimics the shape of a typical hen’s egg. Each bird species lays differently shaped eggs. For example, an ostrich’s egg is more oblong than an owl’s, and an owl’s egg is rounder than a goose’s. Surprisingly, every egg can be described by a single equation with four parameters:

Learn more about this equation and others like it with John May’s Egg Formulas Maple Learn document.

The Easter Egg Art document includes 9 different decorative elements; users can change the color, position, and size of each in order to create their own personal egg! The egg starts out looking like this:



In just a couple of minutes, you can create a unique egg. Have fun exploring this document and share a screenshot of your egg in the comments below!  Here’s one I made: