Never during three years of studying for a Applied Mathematics degree did fractals appear. But as a teenager I spent a lot of time improving my speed typing skills and entering programmes from Acorn User magazine.
Over a year or so, ever faster fractal generation assembler programmes appeared balancing the BBC Micro’s limited screen resolution with its even more limited 6502/65C102 processor.
The “father of fractals” was Benoît Mandelbrot, a Franco-American mathematician born in Poland who discovered the mathematical shapes known as fractals. He died of cancer on 14 October last week, aged 85.
The MathsBank blog have a good post about him, along with links to explore the Mandelbrot Set and other fancy fractals.
2 comments:
Heh. I remember doing fractals as part of my course... although I think it involved programming them, so maybe it was an applied maths module which had more recently been introduced. Or maybe it was in the masters year. Hard to say.
I remember printing them off, though, and the coolest part was that there was a colour printer. An actual real life colour printer.
Thanks for the link!
Post a Comment