the two halves of my tasty brain
Roughly 5-6 years ago, I made an effort to take Fractal rendering code I developed during college and refactor it into a general purpose Java library, mathlib.jar. A hard drive failure and desktop replacement later, and I had assumed that code was lost. In fact, I seem to recall a fight between my former wife and I over the matter, but at any rate, it appears I was wrong.
I’m a big fan of fractals. From
Lindenmayer Systems to variations on
the Mandelbrot set, they all
have a special place in a statistically self-similar region of my brain.
Archimedes can keep his circles, I’ll stick with the striking complexity of
chaos. Given this mild obsession, it should not come as surprise that one of
the first applications I enjoy making when working with a new GUI environment
is a fractal generator. With the addition of Web Workers and programmatic
drawing via <canvas> elements in modern JS implementations, I find the past
repeating itself with affine self-similarity.