I’m prepping for my classical mechanics course, scheduled to start next week. One of the first things we discuss is uniform circular motion and how it looks projected along the x- and y-axes, so I thought it would be useful to have an animation showing that. I found a few animations online, but none really showed the x and y projections I was looking for.

So I decided to create my own using my go-to language of choice Python. Fortunately, python guru Jake Vanderplas has created a very nice animation module usable in iPython Notebooks.

Based on his example here, I put together the following code to generate the desired animation: