Single post
The Mandelbrot Fractal
Introduction
I have just finished CS50x, Harvard’s online computer science offering. For my final project, I implemented a zoomable rendering of the Mandelbrot fractal, in Javascript, using the HTML5 canvas element.
The github repository is accessible at github.com/a2wd/mandelbrot
A live demonstration can be found at the attached github page, a2wd.github.io/mandelbrot
Research
Fractals are fascinating and made for interesting research. The following are pages of note:
A general primer on fractals can be found at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal
In particular, I thought to try the Mandelbrot set which is a fairly simple set of complex numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
To plot the Mandelbrot set, we find the components of the imaginary numbers and mark how quickly the series diverges to infinity for any particular number along the complex plane:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_plane
Example
The following animated gif is a screencast of the fractal engine in action
