This should appear as a collection of concentric light and dark rings, all centered at the middle of the image, except for the fact that to plot this function it has to be pixelated. This means that the function is sampled at various locations and the values of the samples assigned grey levels at the corresponding various pixels. The problem with doing this is that, away from the center of the image, the spatial frequency of the light and dark rings is much greater than the frequency of the pixels, so that not enough information is presented to correctly represent the light and dark rings. This gives rise to (a lot of) spurious detail in the image, in this case all of the concentric rings in the image except those centered at the middle. This phenomenon is called aliasing. This is a pretty extreme example of aliasing. So what does this have to do with my research? Um, nothing yet, and maybe nothing ever. However, I am fascinated by the ways in which simple but partial observation of simple objects can give rise to complexity, and several of my publications have dealt with this phenomenon in one guise or another.
