Conformal Map Explorer

Overview

This was a project I did for a graduate class, PHYS 6124: Mathematical Methods of Physics. The class covered a wide range of important math topics for physics, one of which was complex numbers and conformal maps. I’ll be honest, when I was taking the class, an intuitive understanding of conformal maps eluded me. And at the time of writing this post, I still can’t say I really understand them that well. At the very least, I could appreciate that some prominent map projections — such as the stereographic projection and the Mercator projection — were conformal.

At the time, I was just starting to explore frontend web development, and I was really interested in D3.js, so I decided to try and tailor my final project for the class to fit in some of these interests.

Implementation

The project page shown above is basically intended to give some sort of greater understanding to conformal maps by allowing users to see how different maps transition to each other, and how panning and rotating a map affects its contents.

Ultimately, this ended up being more or less a React-based implementation of some other D3 projects out there (like this one). And unfortunately, using React was not a great experience for this particular use case and probably just overcomplicated things. Based on my (limited) understanding of React and D3, this is basically because React, with its virtual DOM, and D3, are both trying to control the DOM, and managing this control between the two can get tricky. You can check out the implementation on the project repo to see how weird it is (or at least, how weird I managed to make it).