Earlier this year this equation was doing the rounds of the geek community. When plotted it supposedly drew the Batman symbol.
Simple, no? See here for a thorough discussion of how all the pieces fit together.
It would seem that you have to work pretty hard for Batman to appear in your graphs. But today I stumbled across Batman in real scientific paper. Observe…
The plot comes from Supplementary Figure 11 of Li, Y., et al. (2010). The DNA methylome of human peripheral blood mononuclear cells. PLoS Biology, 8(11), e1000533. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000533.
I’ll now be keeping an eye out for superheroes in all my plots!