Earth, Space and Fractals: Real and Imagined Worlds

With more than 370 pictures, "Earth, Space and Fractals" demonstrates the endless array of fantastic and otherworldly images that can be created with today's fractal generation software. The book is laid out in art-folio style with many of the images occupying a full page to emphasize the beauty and mystery of fractal art. While many books on the subject deal with fractal mathematics, this book is instead a picture album that provides a wide variety of fractal images that, in some cases, are paired with artistically matched photos of objects in the real world.

One look at the world around us reveals fractal patterns and images everywhere. The spiral of our galaxy, structure of our nervous system, pattern of veins in a leaf, craggy nature of coastlines, day-to-day changes in weather patterns, ripples of water in a stream, demands of network traffic on the internet, and the ups and downs of the stock market are all examples of the complexity of nature-that which can't be easily defined by the traditional Euclidian math and geometry we learned in school. Fractal math works better in describing and predicting how these disordered and chaotic systems work.

In the late 1980's, Benoit Mandelbrot's pioneering work in the science of fractals spawned a huge public response with trendy fractal images appearing just about everywhere-on posters, clothing, mugs, lunch boxes and more. Moving forward to the present day, free and open-source PC-based software programs such as Mandelbulb 3D and JWildfire make it possible to combine fractal types with literally limitless 3D graphical output to generate images that simultaneously look both "real" and imaginary -- and sometimes mystical or ethereal.

This book catalogs images drawn from ten years of experimentation with fractal software. The folios group similar images: botanicals and life forms, mechanistic forms, architectural forms, places in and out of this world, ornamental forms and mindscapes. A short introduction precedes the folios while appendices offer insight into the creation of the book.