I'm sure everyone who hasn't been completely shut off from society for the past 30 years or has ever stepped foot inside a head shop has seen something along the lines of this next picture, but maybe never knew its name:
It's your standard Mandelbrot fractal pic. It's nothing too special, we've all seen it before, but it does get a little more interesting when you start to look at how it's made and what exactly it is. For those of you who might not know, a Mandelbrot set is in essence nothing more than a complex math equation that has been run through a computer algorithm to calculate which parts of the image should be colored and which parts are empty. What is unique about fractal sets is that you could zoom in on a specific point in the image continuously, without ever losing detail, as the equation would continually update the image to produce a increasingly complex image at any scale.
Big deal, right? well, if you're craving more psychedelia, you're not alone. The search has been on for about 20 years for a way to move the Mandelbrot set into the 3rd dimension. I'm going to spare you all the gory details of the math equations involved in this blog post (find that here). Long story short, math goons have cracked the case and found a few different ways to adapt the Mandelbrot set equations for 3 dimensions. Like the 2-D fractal counterparts, these images are designed to grow exceedingly more complex the further you zoom in; in fact it should never lose its detail no matter how far you zoom in. Check out some of the results:
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