Geeky Math Equation Creates Beautiful 3-D World

The quest by a group of math geeks to create a three-dimensional analogue for the mesmerizing Mandelbrot fractal has ended in success.

They call it the Mandelbulb. The 3-D renderings were generated by applying an iterative algorithm to a sphere. The same calculation is applied over and over to the sphere’s points in three dimensions. In spirit, that’s similar to how the original 2-D Mandelbrot set generates its infinite and self-repeating complexity.

Click here for more information.

Saturn’s Hexagon May Be Solar System’s Coolest Mystery

The Cassini spacecraft has returned the best images yet of the strange hexagonal jet stream that flows around the northern pole of Saturn.

First discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s, the hexagon remains a beautiful mystery to astronomers, and one they’ve been waiting for another shot to see for almost three decades.

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Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest

The Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest is a celebration of the ingenuity and creativity of the world’s premier visual illusion research community. Contestants from all around the world have submitted novel visual illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2008), and an international panel of judges has rated them and narrowed them to the TOP TEN.

Gallery of Illustrations

An interesting website that has plenty of mathematical illustrations.

The Eyeballing Game

The Eyeball website gives you some mathematical figures and asks you to eyeball them correctly. I scored a 5.92 on my first try.

Just scored 3.13 on my second try.

More games at the Games for the Brain website.

Processing

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

There's also a Javascript version of the code.

Running the Numbers

An interesting set of pictures by Chris Jordan that shows the sizes of various U.S. consumptions.

VisIt

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.

A Visual Dictionary of Special Plane Curves

The name says it all. Also check out the main page.

Fractal Land

Fractal Land is were you will find fractal images done with UltraFractal, Fractint, Apophysis & other fractal softwares, and also some links to fractal resources, tutorials and other fractal galleries.

There are two main galleries: The Images and Fractint Images.

Maths Films

The aim of this website is to provide a source of animated mathematical films, images and text to support the teaching of mathematics in ways that build on the intuitions and powers we have all possessed all our lives.

Infinite Fractal Loop

The Infinite Fractal Loop is a web ring dedicated to fractal art. I found it while browsing Keith's Fractal Art.