The Mandelbrot Set by A. K. Dewdney (1985 Scientific American article)

http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/navigation/ideas/articles/mandelbrot/index.shtml

by amichail • 17 years ago

8 6 17 years ago

math.uwaterloo.ca

amichail• 17 years ago

Did you read this article in 1985? Did you code your own Mandelbrot Set program? For which computer? How fast was it?

njl• 17 years ago

My father read the article in 1985, and promptly wrote a program that used the fancy-pants dedicated hardware of the computer vision systems he worked on at the time. I remember going into the office with him when he had to work on a weekend; he showed me how he was using something like $100k worth of parallel processing hardware to make a little gray-scale Mandelbrot set.

His first response to any new system is still to write a Mandelbrot generator. When he semi-retired from his position doing system-level C stuff a few years ago, he decided to give Java a try. He occasionally emails me video explorations of the Mandelbrot sets he has generated. I have a photographic print he made hanging up on my wall right now.

First time he tried to get them to print out one of his images, the person at the one-hour photo at Wal-Mart told him the picture was unprintable, despite multiple tries. The multiple 8x10s were retrieved from the waste basket, and my father got three for the price of one.

brg• 17 years ago

Wow, I read this article when I was ten years old. Later, when I had an IIc I indeed tried to code up the Mandlebrot set. I don't remember if I got it to work, but it wouldn't have been too impressive in GR or HGR.

alfredp• 17 years ago

I came across the article in "The Magic Machine". http://www.amazon.co.uk/Magic-Machine-K-Dewdney/dp/071672144...

I seem to remember doing a very blocky Mandelbrot set on a 286. Good times!

jacquesm• 17 years ago

If you like Dewdney try to find a copy of 'flatland'.

kez• 17 years ago

I was expecting a parody of Peter Mandelson, somehow.

The Mandelbrot Set by A. K. Dewdney (1985 Scientific American article)

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