I spent a lot of time in my early software development days writing programs to display images of the Mandelbrot set and ray trace images of oak wood grain pretzels stuck in lime jello on a mirror in space. That was back before I wanted to be a writer/teacher, when I thought I could be a mathematician. Every once in a great while I write the code for the Mandelbrot in perl or python, just to recall those days when vector calculus was a recreational pursuit.
Dr Mandelbrot has shuffled off this mortal coil. Here’s a link to the Jonathan Coulton song about him.
