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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI 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!
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