Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone in the MaplePrimes community. Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate all things love and romance. To celebrate, we at Maplesoft wanted to share our hearts with you.

Today the heart shape represents love, affection, and a major organ. Though the heart’s full meaning today is unique to the modern era, the shape itself is much older.

 In ancient Greece, the Cyrenese people used the heart-shaped seed of a plant called silphium as a form of contraception. The seed became so widely used that it is featured on Cyrenese currency. This is the first case of the heart shape being connected to love and passion, but the form did not yet have an association with the human heart.

French poet Thibault de Blaison was the first to use a pear-shaped human heart to symbolize love in his thirteenth-century romance “Roman de la Poire”. Later, during the renaissance period, artists began to paint the Sacred Heart of Jesus in a spade-like shape. Depictions of the heart continued to develop and by the Victorian Era, the heart we know and love today had taken shape and started to appear on Valentine’s Day cards.

The simplicity and symmetry of the heart shape, which likely led to its widespread popularity, also makes the form convenient to define mathematically.

To find the equation for your heart, use the Valentine Hearts Maple Learn document. Choose one of four ways to define your heart, then move the sliders and change the color to make a unique equation for your heart. 

Once you’re done, take a screenshot and share it with your Valentine. Who says math isn’t romantic?