In the years 1989 -2004 I spent many hours computing fractal pictures.

Inspired originally by the exceedingly beautiful pictures of the Mandelbrot Set in The Golden Age of Mathematics.

The following picture represents my final achievement, and the furthest I could get from and beyond the Mandelbrot set.


Comments: This is what I call a Solid Fractal. Meaning:

Whereas the MS and most other fractals can be considered to be functions of points on a plane, a "Solid Fractal" represents a function of the points in 3-dimensional space.

The MS treats the points on the plane as complex numbers, then repeats a Process which produces output numbers from input numbers until the value explodes. The number of repetitions required to do this (R) is the function of the starting point, and is usually portrayed by selecting various colours according to various values of R.

I deviated from using complex numbers, I took points in (x,y) format, and used some Process (differing for each fractal picture) to compute fresh points (x,y), repeating the process until the value of x or y exploded. Here again, the number of repetitions required is then used to compute the colour of the pixel on the screen at each coordinate point (x,y).

For Solid Fractals, I simply added another dimension, taking points in space in (x,y,z) format, processing the points to produce new points until explosion, to arrive at a function for each point.

Actually depicting the solid object on the screen, I used sectional views to enable the viewer to see beneath the surface to some extent.

If anyone is interested, I can furnish the computer code by which this and other of my fractals were produced.