I’ve been playing around with ways of showing how to multiply out quadratic factors like the one above. I’m still not perfectly happy with these animations but they’re the best I’ve come up with so far. A smoother, Flash or svg animation might work better though.
In this second version the terms being multiplied are highlighted. I like how the highlighting gives some more stability to the animation, but I’m always leery of putting too much color or bells and whistles because they tend to complicate the picture. In this case at least, I think all the colors have meaning and are useful.
