Fractals are fascinatiing. Something about a statement as simple as x->x^2+c creating an object as beautiful as Mandelbrot's allows for belief in god.
All of these images were generated with some version of fractint, animation by GIMP. I am indebted to The Stone Soup Group for creating the former, and to Spanky for always having a good source for xfractint and pointers to xmfract and other goodies. I am indebted to GNU for GIMP and about 80% of the other SW I use (even my MacOS audio recorder!). The xfractint source has allowed me (though not without a _little_ pain) to run this beautiful piece of number smashing software on platforms from my venerable SUN 4/300 to this iMac running hacked ppclinux/RedHat. And xmfract just seems to work out of the box on every platform it supports.
If it seems that I am obsessed with the Mandelbrot set, it is because I am. I am no master of mathematics, but I can understand the math required for these, and that is what is truly mind-boggling for me. Also, there's no end to the variety from this simple statement, so it stays interesting. For me anyway;)
I still owe alot to spanky and stone soup, but now I'm playing with
Mandelbrain,
truly awesome Mac imaginary number smasher. Ditch your PC. Now. My argument
used to be the price. I got an iMac233 for $800. Here's
the pics.
