Fractals in Nature

Fractals in Nature

The main requirement for a ‘natural fractal’ is that it should look self-similar over a range of scales. That is, if you look closer or zoom in, there are shapes similar to what you saw to start with. A tree …

Astronomy with a Fractalscope

Astronomy with a Fractalscope

Forget Hubble – check out these amazing breath-taking pictures from the Fractal Space Microscope!

I made these pictures with JWildfire – a free and user-friendly image-processing software, mostly known for its sophisticated flame-fractal-generator.
It is Java-based, open-source and runs on …

Alien Life Forms

Alien Life Forms

I wish that I could claim these pictures were the result of artistic inspiration after years of starving struggle and demon-haunted torment, but I am an honest man. I clicked a couple of buttons on my computer – occasionally often, …

Mandrian’s Mandelbrot Music

Mandrian’s Mandelbrot Music

Mandrian is a Python + Pygame program to render the Mandelbrot Set  by sub-dividing square areas into sub-squares. If the square’s corners all have the same iteration count from the escape function we assume there’s no internal detail to render. …

Spectral Harmonographs

Spectral Harmonographs

Not fractals – but still, pretty math pictures… These were created with the following Python program (MIT license; download from GitHub):

You may need to install python and/or pygame, e.g. on Ubuntu/Debian style linuxes:

sudo apt-get install pygame
sudo apt-get …

Julia Sets

Julia Sets

Recall that the Mandelbrot set arises from iterating the complex function z2 + c, where c is a set of points in the complex plane. Those values of c for which z, initially zero, remains bounded are in the …

The Burning Ship

The Burning Ship

The Burning Ship fractal process is similar to the Mandelbrot Set process, but now the real and imaginary components of z are replaced by their absolute values (i.e. replace – with +):

zn+1 = (|Re(zn)| + i …