Fractals

Some Fractals I have made

Back in 2012 I got really interested in fractals, especially of the Mandelbrot and Julia variety. At first, I created a simple Python program to see if I could generate some simple pictures which turned out to be pretty easy. However, doing things in Python is slow, so the challenge became how fast I could create fractals.

The next step was to make it multithreaded. Multithreading for those who are not familiar basically allows you to more fully use the processing power of your computer. The more processors or “cores” the more work you can do at a time. I used the pthreads library and ANSI C to try and make a faster Mandelbrot image.

The results actually turned out quite well, including some cool looking bugs. I was pretty excited with this, so I extended the program to work with Julia fractals as well, due to the similar nature to Mandelbrot ones. I eventually got the program to be so fast, that I used it to create lots of images with different seed points, and strung them together using ffmpeg. I am quite pleased with the results (and even put it on my resume!). Below I have sample images of fractals I was able to create:

Finally, here is a video showing off the video form:

I’ve also uploaded the code I used to create these on my Github