Undergrad Dan Yuan's image here was first runner-up in MIT's annual Weird Fields contest where students generate psychedelic visualizations of vector fields. (Last year's winner here.) The patterns in Yuan's visualization remind me of the background of a Tim Biskup painting.
To help students understand electromagnetic force fields, Professor of Physics John Belcher and colleagues at the MIT Center for Educational Computer Initiatives developed a computer applet into which students put the mathematical expressions that describe a given field. "It then pops out a visual representation of what the field looks like," he said.
UPDATE: As the MIT press release and BB reader Tom Zeller point out, the Weird Fields visualizations bear a striking resemblance to sections of Gustav Klimt paintings. Link
