This particular screensaver did not just nicely *illustrate* math, it actually *motivated* research: <A HREF="https://www.tcd.ie/Physics/research/groups/foams/media/gasket.pdf">A Tisket, a Tasket, an Apollonian Gasket</A>, Dana Mackenzie > In the spring of 2007 I had the good fortune to spend a semester at > the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. Someone had > installed a screen-saver program on the computer. Of course, it had to > be mathematical. The program drew an endless assortment of fractals of > varying shapes and ingenuity. Every couple minutes the screen would go > blank and refresh itself with a completely different fractal. I have > to confess that I spent a few idle minutes watching the fractals > instead of writing. > > One day, a new design popped up on the screen (see below). It was > different from all the other fractals. It was made up of simple > shapes—circles, in fact, and unlike all the other screen-savers, it > had numbers! My attention was immediately drawn to the sequence of > numbers running along the bottom edge: 1, 4, 9, 16 ... They were the > perfect squares! Seeing those numbers awakened the math geek in me. > What did they mean? And what did they have to do with the fractal on > the screen? Quickly, before the screen-saver image vanished into the > ether, I sketched it on my notepad, making a resolution to find out > someday. <IMG SRC="https://ilorentz.org/beenakker/MO/Apollonian.png"/> <A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeWnjSROR8U">Here</A> you can watch the screensaver in action, illustrating <A HREF="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_theorem">Descartes' theorem.</A>