Illustrations of two-dimensonal heat flow

This webpage provides several illustrations of how heat might flow through a two-dimensional region. The hope is that these examples will illustrate the possibilities sufficiently to entice the reader to understand the mathematics behind the animations.

To get started, choose an example from the Example menu below. Some expository text should appear to describe the situation. Hit the "start" button to start the heat flow or use the slider to control it. You can view the heat distribution as a shaded, two-dimensional contour plot or as a three-dimensional graph. When in 2D mode, you can hover over the image to get values. The 3D mode is rotatable.