The Beauty of Fractals - The Images

The Images

Part of the text was originally conceived as a supplemented catalogue to the exhibition Frontiers of Chaos of the German Goethe-Institut, first seen in Europe and the United States. It described the context and meaning of these images. The images were created at the "Computer Graphics Laboratory Dynamical Systems" at the University of Bremen in 1984 and 1985. Dedicated software had to be developed to make the necessary computations which at that time took hours of computer time to create a single image. For the exhibit and the book the computed images had to be captured as photographs. Digital image capturing and archiving were not feasible at that time.

The book was cited and its images were reproduced in a number of publications. Some images were even used before the book was published. The cover article of the Scientific American August 1985 edition showed some the images and provided reference to the book to be published.

One particular image sequence of the book is the close up series "seahorse valley". While the first publication of such a close up series was the June 1984 cover article of the Magazine Geo, The Beauty of Fractals provided the first such publication within a book.


Start of the zoom

Step 2a (Central Spiral)

Step 2 (Part of Tail)

Step 3

Julia Set

Potts Model, q-plane

Newton Iteration

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