# How to plot the following 3D diagram

I'm fairly new to using Mathematica, and I'm currently typesetting our class notes for my classmates in LaTeX and I'm using Mathematica to generate all my figures then export them using the EPS-to-PDF package. I'm fairly rough at developing any sort of abstract figure, so I would appreciate any help in learning how to draw the figure below.

I've played around with Plot3D trying to generate the figure, yet all my efforts were to no avail. The graph in the figure wasn't necessarily defined during class, just an abstract graph for demonstrating partial differentiation.

It looks just like a piece of paper curved a bit floating above the xy axis in the z-direction. It seems to also have a mesh texture on it.

Thank you to anyone who decides to help :)

EDIT: This is what I have seen as the closest figure possible so far.

    Plot3D[{-x^2 - y^2 + 10}, {x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2},
ColorFunction -> "RustTones", Ticks -> None, Boxed -> False,
AxesOrigin -> {0, 0, 0}, PlotRange -> {-1, 20}]


which looks like this:

I still need to get the axes labels, and also sort of "zoom out" along with some rotations.

• Please show code that you have tried. – bbgodfrey Apr 12 '17 at 17:19
• @bbgodfrey added – Hushus46 Apr 12 '17 at 17:31

Of course, simply click-drag on the resulting figure to rotate and command-click-drag to rescale.

Plot3D[{-x^2 - y^2 + 10},
{x, -2, 2}, {y, -2, 2},
ColorFunction -> "RustTones",
Ticks -> None,
Boxed -> False,
AxesOrigin -> {0, 0, 0},
PlotRange -> {-1, 20},
Mesh -> None,
AxesLabel -> {Text[Style["x", 20]], Text[Style["y", 20]], Text[Style["z", 20]]}]


If you want to play with the locations of labels, you might try adjusting AxesOrigin.

• Hello, and thanks for the response! I'm just wondering, whenever I rotate the figure on my mathematica program, depending on how I rotate the figure the axes labels get messed up. For instance, sometimes the letter z is on the x-y plane and the x is on the z axis, sometimes the x and y are stacked, and I can't seem to find a proper angle in which all labels are on the correct axes. Is this something I have to play around with on my end as if it were just a quirk of the wolfram language? – Hushus46 Apr 12 '17 at 18:40