Ab-Initio attempts
I was introduced to the fascinating world of Chaos Theory and Fractal Imaging through James Gleick's book. It was such an exciting read that all of a sudden my perspective towards several things in life changed drastically. Google-power helped a lot in discovering what is going on in this part of world, esp. the art side of it. The images created using certain iterative equations are full of details and self similarity that its tough to get away from them without gazing for a while. You might wanna visit some of these websites
There are several books on this subject, but one by Ian Stewart and another by Julien C. Sprott are best for beginners.
I started exploring world of fractals using GNUPLOT and few perl scripts which can create images only in XPM format. In absence of a GUI interface, it was quite cumbersome to zoom in a certain region, and also to save the plots as images. Plotting and editing C/C++ Libraries distributed as PNGwriter were quite helpful for this purpose. I wrote couple of programs in C++ for creating fractals, but as always, an easy GUI interface was required which can allow me to grab any co-ordinate from the pixel-map of the displayed. Very soon I gave up because X11, X/Motif or QT were not simple enough for me to create an intuitive GUI. I could have used the freely available tools for this purpose, but I was interested in developing one of my own. It definitely aids in-depth understanding of the involved concepts. Also, it brings something interesting to do apart from monotonous job work.
Meanwhile, I came across the book by Charles Seife on the history of mathematics and science which revolves around the concepts of Zero and Infinity. While reading the book, I felt the inherent relation between these concepts and Fractals. Every such image illustrates the beauty hidden in zero and infinity. I find myself speechless when it comes to describing this beauty. Anyways, I have decided to pursue fractals as my hobby.
Off-late, I have been developing an application in Tcl/Tk for GUI with C/C++ extensions for mathematical calculations. Creating your own GUI applications is intuitive with standard Tk's. It hardly took 5-man days to create a working application for my exploratory quest. I have named it, I2-Illustrating Infinity. It is a bare-bone application, but easily customizable with a little know-how about Tcl/Tk. Keep checking this space for further updates on I2 and my exploration on fractals. Please take some time and drop a comment about the article. This helps me in making it more informative and interesting.
There are several books on this subject, but one by Ian Stewart and another by Julien C. Sprott are best for beginners.
I started exploring world of fractals using GNUPLOT and few perl scripts which can create images only in XPM format. In absence of a GUI interface, it was quite cumbersome to zoom in a certain region, and also to save the plots as images. Plotting and editing C/C++ Libraries distributed as PNGwriter were quite helpful for this purpose. I wrote couple of programs in C++ for creating fractals, but as always, an easy GUI interface was required which can allow me to grab any co-ordinate from the pixel-map of the displayed. Very soon I gave up because X11, X/Motif or QT were not simple enough for me to create an intuitive GUI. I could have used the freely available tools for this purpose, but I was interested in developing one of my own. It definitely aids in-depth understanding of the involved concepts. Also, it brings something interesting to do apart from monotonous job work.
Meanwhile, I came across the book by Charles Seife on the history of mathematics and science which revolves around the concepts of Zero and Infinity. While reading the book, I felt the inherent relation between these concepts and Fractals. Every such image illustrates the beauty hidden in zero and infinity. I find myself speechless when it comes to describing this beauty. Anyways, I have decided to pursue fractals as my hobby.
Off-late, I have been developing an application in Tcl/Tk for GUI with C/C++ extensions for mathematical calculations. Creating your own GUI applications is intuitive with standard Tk's. It hardly took 5-man days to create a working application for my exploratory quest. I have named it, I2-Illustrating Infinity. It is a bare-bone application, but easily customizable with a little know-how about Tcl/Tk. Keep checking this space for further updates on I2 and my exploration on fractals. Please take some time and drop a comment about the article. This helps me in making it more informative and interesting.
posted by Madhur Kashyap at 1:40 AM
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