Drawing a monkey saddle surface in matlab?

Question

I'd like to draw a monkey saddle surface using matlab. But how do I plot a function of several variables in matlab? I never did that before. I can define $x$ and $y$ as two vectors and then according to wikipedia the monkey saddle equation is $x^3-3xy^2$ so all I wanna do is plot that function? Are there any more monkey saddle surfaces that might be nicer than this one?

Answer 1

The easiest way is to use the surf command:

x = min_x:step:max_x;
y = min_y:step:max_y;

[X,Y] = meshgrid(x,y);

Z = X.^3-3*X.*Y.^2

surf(X,Y,Z);

should work. I don't have my MATLAB install on this computer, so I cannot verify.