Frontiers of Chaos fractals

Frontiers of Chaos : 37 pictures illustrating the use of computers in experimental mathematics, fractal art, Mandelbrot set, from the Frontiers of Chaos exhibition 1985

Mathematical curve-drawing for enthusiasts became a completely different activity after the introduction of the personal electronic computer, and particularly when the programs became powerful enough to produce fractal art. The group at Brenen University were at the cutting edge of this new art form in the mid 1980s. The mathematics goes back much further, but could not originally be visualised. Benoît Mandelbrot, who did ground-breaking work on self-similarity in the 1960s, coined the word ‘fractal’ in 1975 to describe a pattern that is repeated at every scale.