Sunday, January 29, 2012

"Four Sierpinski triangles interweave in three dimensions, each linked with, but not touching, the other three." By George Hart.
"The strange attractor of the driven pendulum at the parameter values γ= 0.052, a= 0.586, ω= 0.666. The direction of view is diagonal in the state space. The red sections are Poincaré sections at ψ= 0 (in front on the right side) and at x= -π (in front on the left side). The vertical axis is the angular velocity." By Robert Doerner.
Ducks Fractals Variation by Softology.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012


Inspired by Chladni patterns, Hans Jenny pioneered the field of Cymatics, a study of visible sound vibration. Tones played at fixed frequencies cause a vibration that creates patterns from light on water.
A close up of 4 of the hundredth roots of unity. By Ian Sammis.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Four elementary operation tables arranged in a pinwheel format (read more here).
By Magaret Kepner

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Variations of the Mandelbox, a fractal discovered by Tom Lowe in 2010 by applying recursive spherical folding transformations to generate fractals.

Monday, January 2, 2012

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Spherical version of the 2.5 dimensional Julia Set
The basic inverse quaternion julia set.
Ikeda Attractor by Paul Bourke
This image was created by Jonathan McCabe from a cellular automata program he wrote.
"Each pixel represents the state of the 4 cells of 4 cellular automata, which are cross coupled and have their individual state transition tables. There is a "history" or "memory" of the previous states which is used as an offset into the state transition tables, resulting in update rules which depend on what has happened at that pixel in previous generations. Different regions end up in a particular state or cycle of states, and act very much like immiscible liquids with surface tension."
Circles generated by Mobius transform by Ed Pegg Jr.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

3D totalistic cellular automata
John Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton in which randomized cells evolve according to a fixed set of rules. Usually this evolution appears as an animation, here we see the evolution through time in a still image, with height from top to bottom corresponding to subsequent generations of cells.

Monday, December 12, 2011

Quaternion Julia Fractals
"Girih tiles have interior angles that are multiples of π/5. In the examples shown here I’ve applied the girih concept to polygons with angles that are multiples of π/7."

By Joe Bartholomew
A 3-d model of tuna, anchovy and bluefish populations given certain parameters.
The Catalan numbers are a sequence of numbers, much like the Fibonacci numbers, which are given by the equation

Like the Fibonacci numbers, they too pop up all over the place, for example, the Catalan numbers correspond to the number of ways a regular n-gon can be divided into n-2 triangles.
Above is a visualization of the Catalan numbers.

By John C. Hart in 1989
Read more about quaternion fractals (and see more images) here and here.
A map of the internet by Barrett Lyon

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Snowflake
Snowflake hitting the ground
Photos by Andrew Osokin using a macro lens.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Three-dimensional rendering of Julia set using distance estimation by Gert Buschmann.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

100th post!

A Wolfram Demonstration titled Combinations of Sines in the Complex Plane by Stephen Wolfram. He writes "Combinations of two sine functions must always have their zeros on the real line. Combinations of three need not. The height here is the absolute value of the sum of sine functions; the hue is the phase."

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

These images are from a Wolfram Demonstration by Michael Schreiber titled Complex Exponential Resonance. He writes "Complex exponentials of complex exponentials feature resonance patterns. There is only one polygon; black regions are under an odd number of self-overlays."

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

This sculpture is 8 feet in diameter and, from what I can tell, is a compound of five octahedra (a stellation of the icosahedron). The designs are projected onto its surface.
Parmenides I” by artist Dev Harlan

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

A 3-d printed image made from readings on a seismometer by artist Luke Jerram

Monday, October 17, 2011