Most of us can’t tell our secant from our cotangent. But the forms are everywhere, and Nikki Graziano wants to help us see them. Graziano, a math and photography student at Rochester Institute of Technology, overlays graphs and their corresponding equations onto her carefully composed photos. “I wanted to create something that could communicate how awesome math is, to everyone,” she says. Graziano doesn’t go out looking for a specific function but lets one find her instead. Once she’s got an image she likes, Graziano whips up the numbers and tweaks the function until the graph it describes aligns perfectly with the photograph. See more of her Found Functions series at Nikkigraziano.com.

When graphed, this trigonometry function produces an ever-repeating wave of peaks and valleys that mirror the natural curves Graziano sees in plants. (October 2008.)

“It’s a pretty famous function,” Graziano says of this bell curve in the sky. (June 2009.)

Surrounded by piles of snow last spring, Graziano says she couldn’t help but take some photos like this one. (April 2009.)

Nature speaks a language, Graziano says, and sometimes that language can look pretty complicated—like the function whose graph mirrors the shape of this pile of sand. (March 2009.)

Hollywood’s going 3-D, and so has Graziano. She ventured into the third dimension to produce graphs that map the contours of plants. This one is a hyperbolic parabloid.

This function describes 3-D representations of a repeating sine curve.