Burning Ship Fractal


The Burning Ship fractal, first described and created by Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler in 1992, is generated by iterating the function:

in the complex plane which will either escape or remain bounded. The difference between this calculation and that for the Mandelbrot set is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration. The mapping is non-analytic because its real and imaginary parts do not obey the Cauchy–Riemann equations.


Burning Ship Fractal renderings
High-quality deep-zoom image of a small ship in the armada in the left Western antenna of the main ship structure
Burning Ship Deep Zoom to 2.3e-50
The Burning Ship fractal
A zoom-in to the lower left of the Burning Ship fractal, showing a "burning ship" and self-similarity to the complete fractal.
A zoom-in to line on the left of the fractal, showing nested repetition (a different colour scheme is used here).
High quality image of the Burning Ship fractal.
The Burning Ship Fractal featured in the 1K intro "JenterErForetrukket" by Youth Uprising; a demoscene production.

Famous quotes containing the words burning and/or ship:

    “He certainly must be a son of Aurora to whom the sun looms, when there are so many millions to whom it glooms rather, or who will never see it till an hour after it has risen. But it behooves us old stagers to keep our lamps trimmed and burning to the last, and not trust to the sun’s looming.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Only one ship is seeking us a black- Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
    A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
    No waters breed or break.”
    —Philip Larkin (1922–1986)