Mandelbrot set on the Casio

Back when I was still at secondary school and my brother was at sixth form college, he showed me his graphing calculator which had been programmed to show the Mandelbrot set. My memory's a little hazy about the details, so it might not have been my brother, or his calculator, but anyway, a few years later when me and my friends were at college, and I was doing A-level Maths, this became something of a legend. Not that we knew what the Mandelbrot set was, just some pretty picture that you could zoom into over and over again. I doubt you could zoom on the Casio one, but still, we really wanted it on our calculators!

No-one thought I was lying (well I wasn't), but we never managed to find anyone that had the program, or could work out how to do it. Of course, that was the dark ages as far as the Internet was concerned. A quick search just now, and I immediately found a program someone had written for some Casio calculator or other. However, my poor old calculator never made it past the day of the final exam, well, it barely made it through the exam. Who's stupid idea was it to have a battery cover that you couldn't get through without a screwdriver.... or a knife, anyway?

I got my new phone last Friday. After literally months of not making calls following a mishap with the washing machine, I was finally due my upgrade from Orange. So I got an Android this time, and quickly got hold of a couple of free fractal viewing apps. I say quickly, but it took me over a day of messing around with the settings to get any of the downloads to actually get started (a common problem apparently, luckily I finally found a solution that worked). If I remember correctly, it took about an hour for the calculator to grind through the computations to draw the Mandelbrot set... now my phone does it in a flash, and lets me zoom too (one even lets me choose coordinates to draw Julia sets)! Not bad for free. I also downloaded a graphing calculator by the way, as the phone's built in calculator made the one in Windows look sophisticated (unlike my cheapy old Nokia which at least did the trigonometric functions, as well as e, log and so on).

So I've been having a bit of a fractal renaissance recently, probably inspired by starting M337. It's just so amazing how simple the rule behind the Mandelbrot and Julia sets is. I hope one day to do the OU's masters level course on fractal geometry. For the meantime, I've been playing around with the evaluation copy of the rather cool looking Ultra Fractal, reading bits and bobs, and of course, watching various YouTube videos of some the deep zooms and other cool animations people are making these days (try "Mandelbrot Fractal Adventure 1010011010" wow!).

Such a shame Benoit Mandelbrot passed away last year. I can't imagine how it feels to be a pioneer in a field like that. One day maybe... one day.