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Fractals & Chaos | |
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Home « Hobbies « Fractals | |
Preamble
The subject of Fractals & Chaos is so large and complex that I can't possibly hope to explore it fully here. I hope to present some history and anecdotes that will be of interest to hobby mathematicians. Explore the links for technical information.
Fractals
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It all started in September 1985 when I picked up my monthly copy of Scientific American from the newsagent. There on the cover was a tantalizing image of what appeared to be some stunningly beautiful abstract mathematical object. I soon discovered that fractals, chaos and dynamic systems had been a hot research topic for a few years, but they hadn't yet hit the public eye. I still felt a bit embarassed that I didn't find out about these subjects earlier. Soon after the publication of this influential Computer Recreations article by A K Dewdney a long stream of publications appeared popularising the subjects of fractals and chaos. There are too many good books and web sites on fractals and chaos for me to list here, the best I can do is make a quick list of a few good waypoint links to explore further:
...at this point I gave up, as the number of web sites devoted to the topics is beyond my attention span limits. I think the best thing to do is stick any combinations of the words Fractal/Chaos/Mandelbrot into a web search engine like Google or Yahoo! and wade through the results. When I get more time I'll try to compile a short list of links to sites that I personally admire. For the moment, due to lack of time, I won't bother describing the theoretical or mathematical backgrounds of fractals and chaos, as this is discussed in various levels of detail on many other web sites.
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Now the story continues... I believe that Fractal generating software was available on PCs soon after they became popular in the late 80s, but I was still working as a mainframe systems programmer and had little interest in PCs at the time. I had no access to software to generate fractals and produce high-resolution images. In 1990 I was working at Garden Island Dockyards in Sydney as a systems programmer on their Fujitsu mainframe and one of my colleagues had a 386 25MHz PC which ran the Ashton-Tate Multimate word processor and had an early copy of Fractint on it. As an aside: does anyone remember Ashton-Tate?...They were the original inventors of dBASE. My colleague fires-up Fractint and I just about fall off my chair as I see the legendary Mandelbrot set (very slowly) painting itself in VGA resolution in front of my eyes. I spent the next 3 nights at work staying back until about 9pm just playing with Fractint.
Just in case you've returned from an interstellar trip and don't know what Fractint is, I'll tell you briefly: Fractint is a program that generates a huge variety of fractals on PCs, and has recently been ported to Unix and Macintosh. It must be one of the few pieces of software in the modern world that runs in DOS mode, but given that it's a strange piece of hobby software with a need for speed and efficiency, then this is not really a problem. I have found that successive versions of Fractint have continued to work without any problems under every version of Windows from 95 to XP. Follow the Fractint Home Page link above for more information.
I eventually purchased my own PC in April 1992. This PC was the just-released 486-50MHz with 16MB of RAM, a 1MB Targa video card, a huge 128MB hard disk and a 14" viewsonic monitor. This "box" cost $4000 and all it had was a mouse, a keyboard and a screen. CD-ROM drives, scanners, sound cards, network cards and other exotic devices were not a standard part of PCs back then, and would have cost a fortune (if they were available). The first night I took the PC home I stayed up until 4am playing with Fractint. This original PC was supplied with DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 which had been released only a couple of weeks earlier. I still have the original diskettes.
In the early-mid 90s I spent many enjoyable late nights sitting up alone playing with Fractint, zooming down into wierd and colourful worlds. I recently created a Galley page with scans of photos of screen-shots from the early 1990s and most of the images were generated by Fractint V17 for DOS.
Jump to the Gallery of Screen Shots which
include dozens of Fractint generated fractals
A fantastic collection of fractal images far more interesting than my 1992 experiments can be found at the web site of Nick Stevens. See Nick's Fractals.
Now the history lesson is over, why do I consider fractals and chaos a hobby of mine? Because after 17 years I continue to be amazed by their beauty and diversity. I might only fire-up Fractint a few times a year now, but each time I still feel a twinge of the excitement I felt way back in 1990 when I first saw the Mandelbrot set on a PC. For completeness, I think an image of the whole Mandelbrot set is required.
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Chaos
I've run out of time to compose a discussion of chaos, but I hope to return to the subject and complete this page as soon as I have time.
