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beautiful mathematics
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Who started ?
If you prefeer a more spontanous meeting with beautyful fractals and less
heavy mathematics, the book The Beauty of Fractals is recommended. It was
publishet in 1986, with 199 pages and 185 figures, many in colour.
You have a fine opportunity for doing this by downloading a freeware program
called Fractal Forge. You find it in Google, just try this :
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Fractovia - Fractal Forge Fractal Forge v.2.8.2 is freeware. You can use it to draw your
own fractal images, and explore Mandelbrot Set's branches. Now it's easier and
faster than ... http://www.fractovia.org/uberto/ –
When you have got in on your screen, just click in upper left corner and then on
File and Open file. Then you get 30 different fractals you can play with. Chose
one of them, and Open it. Wait for some seconds, and then click in upper right
corner. This should bring you a menu, and click on Data. Now you can enter into
the formula, change iterations etc. etc., and then click on Start to see the result.
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The computation of fractals
The simple formula, first used by Benoit B.Mandelbrot was this :
Z = Z2 + C
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In the equation (x=x2+ C ), the C for Julia
sets are more sophisticated, having a
complex number involved. This imply
infinite possibilities for the developing of
fractals.
Flashbacks
Mandelbrot’s set, discovered and joined in the therm “Fractals” in the early
1970’s is one of the most beautiful and profound discoveries in the history of
mathematics. Not since Pythagoras and the Greeks (ca. 600 B.C) who
documented all their mathematical breakthrough has there been such a
revolutionary discovery.
Fractals were not discovered until the invention of computors. It was virtually
impossible to discover fractals before the advent of the computor, because of
their complexity and gargantuan output.
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Some geometric figures in a basic form was given in 1918 by Gaston Julia. In
the 1960’s early experiments with computor graphics, primarely at MIT, gave
some more advanced figures. The interest in fractals now increased rapidly.
I managed several years later to get this article (13 p, 23 images) sent from
KTH, and could study what was presentet as new image materials for fractals,
intended as a contribution to the matematics and phyics training in the sixth -
former scool.
Programs for three experimental tasks was given, written in the program
language Turbo Pascal 4.0. My curiosity for such an opportunity lead me to put
“new life” into my IBM Aptiva from 1994, and try to download the language
Turbo Pascal 6.0 , which I had accessible. I did’nt succeed , don’t know why.
Instead, the sections concerning Real iteration and Complex iteration was very
instructive, and had references to several typical images/figures. The computor
for the more simple figures was an IBM PS2, but for more advanced images a
bigger computor (Apollo) was used.
Concerning Real Iterations this article shows an examples with the following text
given :
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Concerning Complex iteration , the iteration of the polynom z2 + c , where c is a
constant, and z is a complex number z= x + iy, where x and y are real numbers
and i2 = -1.
c = -0.74543 + 0.11301i
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Skien, 20.februar 2010
Kjell W. Tveten