Benoit Mandelbrot Dies At 85

Beetle B. writes "Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at the age of 85. I first learned of the Mandelbrot set while reading Arthur C. Clarke's The Ghost From The Grand Banks. Soon after, I got hold of the best fractal generation software of the day — Fractint — and ran it for long periods of time on my XT, exploring the beautiful world that Mandelbrot, among others, had opened up for me. That it was only on a 4-color CGA did not deter me!"

From his February 2010 TED visit

[QuietLagoon]

His presentation [ted.com].

Re:Dead?

[BradleyUffner]

I didn't know he was still alive. So much for assumptions.

I only knew he was still alive because of this song.
http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/Mandelbrot%20Set [jonathancoulton.com]

Re:Fractint

[paskie]

The best I know is GNU XaoS. It can do real-time zooming (it did fine even on my old P133!) and features plenty of settings and fractal equations. I know there are perhaps better programs nowadays that let you easily write custom equations, scripts for 3D fractals and whatnot, but AFAIK none is free and/or supports Linux well.

Re:Dead?

[Beorytis]

I knew he was still alive because of this TED talk [ted.com]

.

Re:Testimony

[butlerm]

I put the pseudocode into Atari Basic on my trusty 800XL (1.86kHz)

I think you mean something megahertz. A one kilohertz computer wouldn't be good for much of anything. The Apple II, C-64, Atari 400/800, etc. all ran 1 Mhz 6502 CPUs at approximately 1 Mhz, somewhat more than that in the Atari case.

Re:Was there ever a real-time viewer...

[spitzak]

He asked for "real time".

I would suspect the switch from hardware doubles to software arbitrary-precision produces many orders of magnitude of slowdown so the answer is no.

Re:Fractint? Pah?

[nurb432]

Real men did it with checkerboards. In the 80's i had an ST, so i was not trapped in 8-bit color land. But the overnight thing, i totally agree.