Mandelbulber is a software program created to capture images of the Mandelbulb and other 3D fractals. The fractalforums.com community members who discovered the Mandelbulb also developed two pieces of software for rendering images of it, and its family of complex, chaotic objects: Mandelbulber (Windows, Mac, Linux) and Mandelbulb 3D (Windows, Linux). Krzysztof Marczak created Mandelbulber. Most of the images on this site, at time of launch, were created using the Mac version of this application. For those wishing to explore 3D Fractal forms in greater depth, these programs are invaluable. What is Mandelbulber? From Mandelbulber.com: Mandelbulber is an experimental application that helps to make rendering 3D Mandelbrot fractals much more accessible. A few of the supported 3D fractals: Mandelbulb, Mandelbox, BulbBox, JuliaBulb, Menger Sponge, Quaternion, Trigonometric, Hypercomplex, and Iterated Function Systems (IFS). All of these can be combined into infinite variations with the ability to hybridize different formulas together. Visit Mandelbulber.com to find out about the application, download it, and see some of the amazing images that fractal artists have created using the software. Mandelbulber: 3D Fractal Explorer
Benoit Mandelbrot, Father of Fractal Geometry
In November 2002, I saw Benoît Mandelbrot’s presentation, “The Fractal Revolution”, in Portland Oregon. It was a short overview and introductory presentation about fractals. I’m an enthusiast, so the content was familiar. The great pleasure was seeing the man himself – Benoît Mandelbrot, the Father of Fractal Geometry – talk about how he revolutionized science, math, and our entire view of the world. Fractal dimensionality explains something truly fundamental about the forms and patterns we see daily. However, fractal dimensionality was unknown before Benoît Mandelbrot’s work, which from the late 60s on illuminated this deep truth about the geometry of the world. During Mandelbrot’s 2002 talk, it struck me how much intuition informed his discovery of fractal geometry. Mandelbrot described looking at the ‘drunkard’s walk’— a kind of ‘random walk’ equation—and “seeing” what its fractal dimension was, intuitively. Such amazing intuitive leaps are familiar in science. The formal steps of providing solid proof soon follow this “eureka” moment, during which the answer is revealed. Mandelbrot’s sudden deciphering of the ‘drunken walk’ is no different from, nor any less significant than, Einstein’s discovery of relativity, Isaac Newton’s apple-inspired understanding of gravity, and the original “eureka” moment, when Archimedes’ bodily volume displaced the water in his tub. Like those intellectual explorers before him, Mandelbrot looked at the world and saw a previously unseen truth. He built on what came before, and in so doing, revolutionized it. Mandelbrot intuited the world’s fractal nature. …
Enter the Mandelbulb
3D fractal environments both beg and dare you to enter them