Robert J Morton

Personal Project Mandelbrot Set Generator: Having read about the Mandelbrot Set, I simply had to write an applet myself to generate it. It must be one of thousands. It is probably not the best.

Please enable your browser's java engine to view this applet.

But that is not the point. The point for me was seeing this complex image materialise from such simple code. The fascination came in realising that this complexity was born not of an incomprehensible branch of mathematics or fancy programming but from a simple numeric process: an amazing phenomena which was woven by nature into the fabric of numbers themselves.

In this applet the x-axis runs from -2.2 to +1.2 and the y-axis runs from -1.3i to +1.3i. You can extend the coverage by altering the constants XMAX, YMAX, XBIAS and YBIAS in the Java source code and then recompiling it. You can explore different parts of the Mandelbrot set at different scales of magnification by suitably altering these same constants.

I first prototyped my Mandelbrot Set generator in QuickBASIC. I then developed it futher in C before Java became so popular as the language of the Web.