Construction of a Steiner Chain

December 14th, 2010

The Steiner chain is a set of circles inside an outer circle, where all circles are touching their neighbor in a single point. Naturally the first version within Flash is already made by Mario Klingemann in 2002 to create some nice artwork. He also has a AS3 version in his libs.

My version is rather optimized for runtime purpose, does not create objects in runtime.

Press UP/DOWN to add/remove circles to the steiner chain.
Press RIGHT/LEFT to adjust the rotation speed.
Ensure keyboard focus (Click once in the Flash movie)

View this page in Romanian by courtesy of azoft.

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More references
Wiki | Wolfram

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7 Responses to “Construction of a Steiner Chain”

  1. Steiner Chain - Flashforum Says:
    December 14th, 2010 at 2:42 pm

    [...] Chain Sources und mehr infos gibt es hier. __________________ aM blog | laboratory | tonfall | processing [...]

  2. Tweets that mention Andre Michelle » Blog Archive » Construction of a Steiner Chain -- Topsy.com Says:
    December 14th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Mario Klingemann, Andre Michelle, ☞ DcTurner, Filippo Lughi, jeremynealbrown and others. jeremynealbrown said: RT @andremichelle: New Blogpost: Construction of a Steiner Chain http://tinyurl.com/steinerchain [...]

  3. Ian Ford Says:
    December 14th, 2010 at 7:49 pm

    I had never heard of Steiner chains before, but this is really quite lovely.

  4. Pascal Says:
    December 19th, 2010 at 9:13 pm

    Great job,

    This could be a new way to navigate within an application:
    - Circles receive focus each time they become the “biggest” instance on the face of the main circle.
    - Clicking the red circle allows access to information associated with the focused circle by firing an event.

    Just some thoughts anyway.

  5. red Says:
    December 23rd, 2010 at 9:05 am

    never heard of Steiner chains before, but this is really quite lovely.

  6. Phoenix Says:
    June 23rd, 2011 at 7:26 pm

    I was listening to your “Doomed tracks from the nineties” while playing around with this fun creation. They fit together like peas in a pod.

  7. Gene Partlow Says:
    April 20th, 2013 at 12:40 am

    Hi…
    I notice, in the wikipedia steiner chain
    entry, that the ~speed of the centers of
    the steiner circles following an ellipse
    seems to roughly follow an inverse square
    law (a la Kepler). Is there anything to
    this?
    Thanks,
    Gene

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