painting with random walks

this week I tried some ways to draw random walks on PyLab. random walks are aleatory “decisions" following a statistical distribution. in this way we can start drawing at point x, flip a coin and decide to go to another point x+i. that’s it, over and over again.

for this series of paintings I used an uniform distribution to calculate a list of theta values to be used in Euler’s formula. with theta we can calculate the real and imaginary parts of complex numbers, those are respectively x and y inside the cartesian plane. after having all those coordinates we do accumulative sum, yielding the coordinates for a uniform distributed random walk.

here are the series, with thousands of random walks superposed, using some color palettes.