I've never had the patience nor inclination to really get into math, but when there's software that provides some non-mathematical audio/video output to an equation I can't help but poke at it.

Mac OS X comes with a neat little application for doing just that. It's called "Grapher" and resides in the "Utilities" folder (inside "Applications").

Not only can you create 2 dimensional graphs from equations, but you can also graph in 3 dimentions and create Quicktime animations of equation parameters changing incrementally. The "Examples" menu provides a number of sample equations to tweak and break.