Awesome idea, too bad most of the heavy lifting is done by encoding the image in a big constant... if the constant itself was in the formula the awesomeness would be higher.

From the WP entry: "The formula itself is a general purpose method of decoding a bitmap stored in the constant n, so it could actually be used to draw any other image, and does not in fact contain any reference to itself. This is not the case with Tupper's later self-referential equation whose plot describes only itself."

What's this "Tupper's later self-referential equation"?

It's just like a quine that uses stores some sort of numerical representation of itself as a byte array in the code.

Other than using this as an example in C.S courses, would this be applicable or useful for anything?

No, but it's pretty cool.

"The formula itself is a general purpose method of decoding a bitmap stored in the constant n"

Although you need to tweak the constants (that 17) depending on the height.

oh it's definitely cool. I'm just thinking about ways I can make this useful.