connett circles

Like Barry Martin's 'Hopalong' fractal, this dynamical system from John Connett was first published in Scientific American in 1986. This demo is interactive: successively clicking two points specifies a rectangle to zoom into. Doing so, you'll see that the system isn't actually a fractal. Instead of self-similarity, deep zooms reveal peacock-like images.

martin attractor

This pattern generator, discovered by Barry Martin, was nicknamed 'Hopalong' when Scientific American introduced it in their September '86 issue.

Clicking the window adjusts the viewport position; there is also an alternate version with color and animation.

Also, for a certain Rubyist friend, I wrote another lazily-evaluated, colored and animated implementation in Ruby.

lyapunov fractals

It took me some experimentation to figure out how to color this derivation of the logistic map; I'm still not quite sure how the hues should scale as you zoom. But the bi-tonal method shown below works well enough to produce the image at left - click it for more detail.

the mandelbrot set

What programmer hasn't at some point written an implementation of Benoit Mandelbrot's great discovery, the most famous fractal in the world? Here's my own minimal version, with the simplest possible coloring scheme. To interact with it, just click any two points: the window will zoom in on the rectangle they define.