A closer look at Fractals

Some observations about the classic Mandelbrot and Julia

sets
by Kai Krause

Part 1: Spirals
There are some fundamental shapes in nature and one of them is the spiral - from the DNA helix
to galactic nebulae they can be found in sheer endless variety and across all size scales.
One might expect that the abstract world of mathematics is equally full of spirals and within that
the classic fractals of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets also contain many different forms and across
all scales as well.
But there are some surprises in how this all happens - and while you may well have seen fractal
imagery for years, it is the small details that are worth examining.
This little essay is trying to bring some of these unusual visual forms to light, show examples of
the variety and oddity as well - and and muse about their implications a bit

The images are all generated with Frax on an iPhone and iPad, see the website for more
information.
So to jump right in, let us begin with the basic starting point: the Mandelbrot set, here in plain
monochrome:

We only need to zoom in at the thin spikes that separate the circular shapes from one another
and, already within just a few zoom stages, smaller features will come into view and almost
instantly there they are: spirals!

And the first thing to realize is: there is never an actual singular object that would be turning in
a spiralling way, but what is perceived as a spiral is composed of multitudes of repeating
smaller shapes that are forming a composite spiral path - quite a different concept.
One way to think of it is that for example bighorn sheep: they have horns formed in a physical
spiral shape, whereas a galaxy may look like a spiral, but is composed of myriads of individual
stars, organized in that shape.
The Mandelbrot and Julia sets are really not objects as such either, they are mathematical virtual
constructs which represent boundaries of a very simple equation.
As you evaluate these limits you are computing the coordinates of a point in a continuous curve,
just like the formula for a sine wave will draw that familiar shape.

Here is a region with such points drawn in simple 1 bit on or off black and white:

It is the special nature of Frax however, that it will not merely draw those lines as show above
here but it is then filling the spaces between them. This is actually the entire definition and
character of the Frax images, that they are using those spaces and applying 3D height to raise
them up, then adding complex color gradients and textures and then 3D lighting with gloss and
reflections: The result are depthy forms as if made from plastic or metal or glass, which kind of
live within the boundaries given by the Mandelbrot and Julia sets.
Here is an example of what that looks like for the area shown above:

The result is a visualization of the M-Set, but almost in reverse, showing the negative spaces
instead!

Note how that big grey spiral fits exactly into the white space of that flat drawing abovethey
complement each other perfectly - and not only in a 2D image, but in 3D as you continue to
zoom in! It is important to understand that every picture you see here is merely a 2D slice of a
3D zoomable construct.
To continue further there are many surprises waiting for us. If you look closer at this area you
will find that there are two kinds of spiralling behaviours to be found:

The first type is individual small elements that seem to be attracted by a certain point in their
center and will look like a path that orbits around that, getting ever closer to it.
The second is also a point in a center, one that attracts the shapes in a radial fashion, seen above
in the left half
It can be likened to a rocket orbiting the earth at a fast speed and slowly getting closer, versus
one that has no radial velocity of its own and is falling straight towards the center of gravity.
Both these forms are related and can often be found in may surprising combinations: just look at
this region :
An odd double cross of each spiral type :

This is really just four points that are attracting the shapes like gravity - but how elegant that
turns out to be!
You can click here to download that as a QuadHD 4K image ( 3840 x 2160 ), look at it at 1:1
pixels, zoomed in!
Another unexpected finding as you look around other areas look at this spiral and see if you
spot the oddity:

Yes indeed: what looked like a spiral at first glance is actually TWO identical spirals intertwined
perfectly to form one large one! Look at the large grey area in the middle of the left half and

follow it towards the center and you soon notice that it is only half of the shape, the rest coming
in from the right.
Here is another such thing, easier to see :

It looks so simple that one may not even realize that this is not at all a straightforward obvious
thing to do.
Consider this: if I asked you to take a pencil and draw three spirals, interlocking, that perfectly
form a large spiral in the center, always balancing the distances between them. you would see
that you end up having quite a hard time to get that done: things bump into one another very
easily and it turns out dilettante and ugly as heck ;)
And yet the fractal boundaries solve this task effortlessly and perfectly - and remember this all is
a 3D zoomable depthy shape as well ! You could enlarge that center there and find that it is just
as perfect with both arms flowing around it in perfect harmony as you go deeper and deeper
But can it do three spirals ?? Indeed it can Here is one example

and you are also beginning to see another miraculous property: this entire region here is filled
with more copies of these triple spirals! You can find them on the left and right, at all the
edges and the more you look the more you realize: the entire spiral itself is composed of triple
spirals that are feeding into it from all sides! And it is not a few hundred or a few thousand,
it is really infinitely many spirals continuing in-depth as well, each edge composed of further
edges with further spirals!
Here you can download the small inset region in the upper right at full Quad HD 4K size ( 3840
x 2160 )
We will come back to his concept of self-similarity, but let us just finish up on the previous
notion: It may look so effortlessly easy here, but that trivializes the task: filling a plane - or
worse: 3D space with depth! - with balanced interlocking multiple spirals is not at all obvious, let
alone simple.
Soon one begins to find more and more examples in different regions for just about every
number of spiral arms (and each of the infinite number of copies along the edges and in depth
are all using seven as well)
If that is not awe-inspiring:

Lest you just figured that there is a pattern with odd numbers only, here is an example with
four contributories:

Again: it strikes me as an extremely complex problem to solve, to come up with any of these
designs if you were given the task just to make a single one on a sheet of paper - but this is not
one, not thousands but zillions of them, layered in depth!
At this point it seems appropriate to mention people like M.C. Escher, who has done SO much
for the general appreciation of the link between mathematics and aesthetics: showing the sheer
beauty in such mundane topics as tessellation ( filling a plane gaplessly ). His images are still
timeless and almost unprecedented, a darn shame that he got run over by the zeitgeist, how it

could ever be true that an MC Hammer became better known I shall never understand, but such
is the wisdom of the crowd.
Someone who invested thousands of hours in meticulously executed manual drafting of recursive
graphics like Maurits would probably self-combust instantaneously at the sight of the details
of fractals I will devote another essay some time to exploring similarities in his drawings to
things I found in Frax, some eerie parallels.
In no way am I trying to say the Mandelbrot set is art, on the contrary: the creative effort and
ingenious solutions Escher came up with are truly the pinnacle of real art but what I am
wondering really is: how much a mind like his would be inspired by the shapes and forms of
fractals, and how puzzled he would be, to find them hardwired into such a tiny formula.
But before we get deeper let us first look at more examples of the unexpected oddities hiding
deep inside the Mandelbrot and Julia sets and focussing on spirals still!
So we step back and examine the nature of the spirals some more: the images show lots of the
little swirlies at all the edges - infinitely many of them. Btw: in Frax itself there is a depth limit
as a trade-off to remain fully realtime immersive. In the pure mathematics of fractals however,
the zoom to the edges continues to infinity. The computation does get iteratively worse as well,
of course - but the self-similarity makes it a diminishing return to spend the time to go there.
Here is an example again: the myriad of little spirals showing up near all edges of this shape:

That looks like a real solid object with carved ornamentals along the edges - but there are also
entirely different kinds of spirals that are most mysterious!
Look at this innocent bit of turquoise spirality here: at first glance not all that different really

But let us zoom in just a little bit you notice the gap there in the center? They are clearly not
touching there:

And if you look a little closer, you see that there are several such groups, with gaps in between..
right? Right but it gets worse: even the areas that DO look connected arent ! Lets zoom
into the center bottom area:

Even if you zoom in some 10,000% deeper, you still get these kind of cursive P -like shapes,
which are composed of spirals with spirals:

and then after a while you do realize: NONE of them are EVER connected to anything at all! The
whole thing is a construct of a certain look that consists of the same kind of lego blocks, all of
which have that same look again, and are themselves built up of further lego blocks
There are two rather profound statements here: one that there are shapes that preserve perfect
self-similarity without any limit to scale changes and second that it contains shapes from entirely
unconnected building blocks. Seeing that in a graphical depiction in front of you, and letting you
zoom in directly in realtime continuously is just a truly deep concept if you think about it a
little

But let us continue with more examples: here is another look at infinite spirals built from spirals
of spirals, this time a Julia set in its entirety:

You can download the 4K size here and the extreme bottom tip in the center again as a 4K zoom
image here
But there are still further levels of complexity to be found Here is another one of those
challenges to try:
Drawing a point that attracts spirals radially is already quite a feat. It can look something like
this:

But now the surprise part: as you zoom out of this area a bit, you find that that entire massive
attractor radial spiral is replicated zillions of times and arranged in yet another super-spiral!
Have a look at this gigantic field of nested mega structures, the image above is a tiny spot in the
center here now:

And now we have hit upon a rich vein: examples of dense fields of shapes!
Here are a few such snapshots, starting with a Julia (often recognizable with the center
symmetry)

and here a fun skewed Mini-Mandelbrot Set, red in the lower left corner. Notice that they
continue following inside the spiral path towards the center, surrounded by the spirals on the
arms, which themselves are all spiralling towards their own centers, wonderfully dense.

This one is available here as a Quad HD 4K image as well, to be viewed zoomed in at 1:1 pixels
100% scale
Btw, the Mini-Mandels are a topic for a post by themselves: Frax has a built-in database of the
largest 10,000 sets, and a little hidden easter-egg: if one shuffles locations with a Mini in view,
one lands on another random Mini Thus one can quickly examine the fields around Minis and
they can be extremely dense: here is an example - notice the spiral types everywhere: they are
not regular in any way, and yet still evenly balanced wherever you look and always

remember that this is also organized in the z axis, in depth: as you zoom in, the same evenly
balanced density continues perfectly There is no precedence for this, nor an equivalence in
nature - it is the pure perfection of the principles in mathematics. ( This image is particularly fun
in QuadHD 4K size, download here )

A little earlier we had the case of spirals made up of building blocks that actually never
touched, a myriad of smaller elements,ever receding further towards smaller self-similar ones at
the next scale down. But it is not as simple as saying that is how fractals are made - here is a
region of the exact opposite!

In this area everything you see is all connected up as one gigantic structure! If you follow the
lacquered black shapes ( all with little spirals at the edges ) you will find out that no matter
where you start, it will connect back up and as you can see on the far left edge, there are yet
larger stalks on the perimeter that are the common link even for those that seem to be on
separate spiral arms. (See it better up close in 4K resolution here )
There is a wonderfully perfect balance here between figure and ground - which is a theme of
Escher in many paintings and drawings, several even called that - and it also touches upon other
very central notions such as YinYang, being and nothingness. There it is, interleaved in 2D space
and also in 3D depth!
One can create such a thing with spheres in a lattice grid - but this is achieving it without
regular simplistic rules, it looks organic and has wildly differing local phenomena, changing
continuously without ever losing that balance. The more you look, the more you can appreciate
the impossible challenge of that - and yet it is all contained in that tiny formula.
Now to switch gears, other spiral images that can be simply inspiring. Starting with a little blue
thing:

Lovely shapes, wonderful especially the interplay of sharp and soft, the colors condensing.
And yet another very large topic opens up now: as mentioned before, Frax is adding a complex
texture engine to the classic Mandelbrots and Julias - and not just simple flat images like wood
or marble or metal, but algorithmic textures that scale along with the zooming into depth! They
must maintain their clean features across gigantic orders of magnitude. And while they are not
part of the pure definition of the Mandelbrot, they illustrate another principle: one can create
absolutely beautiful images by using the fractal boundaries as a kind of guard rail, akin to a
playing field defined by the M and J Sets, in which textures and color gradients can sprawl.
Here is such an example exploding into irregularities, non-continuities, gigantic spaces of
diversity in form, color, detail - pure inspiration for any visual artist. What would Maurits have
felt, flying around continuously in this:
(Much more interesting in the larger 4K size here)

There will be purists arguing this is an arbitrary image, but it IS related very intimately to the
Mandelbrot set: that is what provides the shape in which the texture can live - as if you were to
pour a liquid into a plastic spiral. This is a kind of plasticine ferrofluid which visualizes the
underlying field lines as dictated by the classic M Set - the combination is a wonderful explosion
in possibilities: to escape the self-similarity and yet retain the rigorous perfection, even in 3D
depth: this object is fully zoomable !
There are endless ways to continue there, embellishing the pure points and lines with more
complex patterns and forms. The general geometry here is all defined by the Mandelbrot and
Julia sets, no objects are modelled here. Just the style, color and lighting are custom features of
Frax - a nice symbiosis.

And another one here with lovely wobbly shapes adding a further organic feel to the often all
too perfect lines: Also one for the full 4K resolution here

This example is another supercluster of spiral centers being whirled around in a larger spiral. It
has a delicate ornamental white lace quality, especially in the full size 4K, download here

In a way we are just getting started with the example of complex textures cast into the spiral
shapes, but it is probably enough for starters ;) If you have not seen it, there is a showcase of
large files and galleries.
As a closing thought: the self-similarity in the Mandelbrot and Julia sets is often compared to
ever smaller scales in nature and you may well know the kinds of ferns and broccoli and river
deltas that are often used as examples. But there is always a limit, beyond which the broccoli is
not looking like the molecules it is composed of, and once you get down to the atom level, they
also bear no resemblance to the shapes they build - let alone quarks, where we are at a loss to
describe their true nature, grasping at straws of 11 dimensional strings vibrating and such. At
best it works for a few orders of magnitude, but then you hit the Planck length as a brick wall.
In the mathematical version however, there are infinite magnitudes with no end in sight and no
limits to express! If you are willing to type in a million digits you can zoom that much deeper but we have no reason to believe that you will not find the same shapes repeated further down. In
fact, some areas have been examined at scarily gigantic scales (easily found in the many articles
everywhere).

To me, exploring these fine details and then realizing the extent of the ungraspable is bringing
me back to a quotation that influenced me greatly
The deepest, most sublime emotion we are capable of
is the experience of the mystical and the miraculous.
From that alone true science can emerge.
He to whom this emotion is foreign,
who can no longer wonder and lose himself in awe,
is already spiritually dead.
Albert Einstein

A closer look at Fractals Part II

Some observations about the classic Mandelbrot and Julia sets
by Kai Krause

Part II: Expect the Unexpected

In Part I the specific case of Spirals was examined a bit, but there are many more types of shapes
to be found. Beyond the basic formations it is the general behaviour though, that is so
fascinating: the way all the shapes can behave in unexpected ways and surprise you over and
over again. Lets start with a basic example.
The Mandelbrot Set can be described as a combination of circular shapes and a so called
cardioid, a dented circle, but at the very tip there is also a region comprised of a straight line.

As one can zoom in deep, here is a look at that area magnified several hundred percent

And you see the little MiniMandel Set there, mentioned a few times before and worthy of a
whole treatise some time ( Frax has a built-in database of 10.000 such Mini Sets, that one can
hop to directly, an easter egg )
So the assumption is oh there is another copy of the whole thing down there, it is probably
just like it, right ? But have a look: here is the very same tip as above, but in some deep version
of a Mini Mandel

And now look what happened to the super ultra straight tip!!!
It is wonderfully NON-straight, ragged as heck, in fact So much for the expectations.

And this is also a reflection of the analogy to nature: there is actually no such thing as real
straight lines in Nature - it is always introducing a certain amount of diversity!
That is really one of the essences of Nature: it not only abhors a vacuum, it also tries to increase
the diversity - forever splitting what is one, always meandering and branching
In my personal view, that is one of the most intriguing aspects of dealing with fractals: far
beyond some funny pictures it yields examples and analogies for concepts in physics, that
simply do not exist in our everyday surroundings. As the thinking about new theorems is still a
very human process, our methods for acquiring new ideas is intricately linked to language - how
we express abstractions and concepts - as well as our reference boxes of experience from which
we can form analogies - one of the central pillars of forming one of those new ideas
How often have the venerous billiard balls been used to illustrate principles of forces,
trajectories, momentum or spin and on and on or the orbiting little spheres that we were all
taught in school as the essential nature of atoms moving along on planes, circling a center and
hopping from one level to another, etc etc. These pictures can help visualize the dry formulas in
an immediate mental image and are immensely useful to augment the attempts to do so with pure
language or math symbols alone.
However. and there is the rub there are simply limits to what the analogy can be relied upon
- and often the correspondence simply ends at certain limits and worse: it can lead to entirely
false conclusions if taken too literally. And as we should have known a long time ago: clearly
atoms are nothing like little balls in perfect paths around a nucleus - it is a heck of a lot more
complex than that - and frankly, more complex than was even possible to assume, let alone deal
with, at the beginning of the discovery.
Such an example is the behaviour at the quantum level: one can find the early discussions of
Bohr and Einstein revolving around very simplistic thought experiments - and trying to find
flaws in the theories by attacking that proposed device - as in a way, that is all they could do at
the time, since there simply was no other reference box to choose from, no other experience data
to draw their analogies from, that could express the complexity.
In hindsight of course, it should have been visible and obvious that even the simplest examples
of nature absolutely explode in complexity. Take a candle and extinguish the flame : the smoke
exits upwards but is that a straight line? It is a visible demonstration of utter chaos, so easily
observed right there in front of you - and there are endless variations of this complex behaviour,
once you choose to look for it.
At the beginning of the physics debates that led to a bevvy of Nobel prizes there was no such
thing yet - chaos theory was on a distant horizon ( with a few interesting early exceptions that did
not become mainstream ).
What I am trying to describe here is a rather serious point and not at all associated with those
cute little fractals normally : they DO exhibit behaviour that is unprecedented in our natural
surroundings, and which CAN serve as great fodder for ideas and analogies, yielding new
theories that can make intuitive sense - where there was nothing to hold onto before! The kind of

infinite self similarity just does not hold true after a few orders of magnitude - and much of the
real nature of Nature is far beyond plain little billiard balls
Complexity and Chaos are by now seen as a very basic part of the arsenal and vocabulary of
physics - but still there is much to look at within fractals that I find totally underrated as yet. It
seems that the mis-use of the images for cheap little psychedelic effect has undermined their
value as a rich vein for our reference boxes
But back to the visual examples of all of this now: let us have another look at the unusual and
unexpected character of the basic fractals - here now something in a Julia set:
As a start, this is already pretty complex:

So you get the feeling ok I see it there is that raggedy thing repeating half a dozen times,
getting smaller towards the right always the same circle with twirls around it
And it feels as if one gets it and has an idea, how that should continue further towards the
right edge presumably it will get smaller while retaining those shapes, right?
Alas, no. ;) Lets have a look:

There it is, suddenly making an almost 180 turn and wtf? What is that weird little
symmetrical bit there? Just as it seemed to be predictable it popped out and did something
else.
Ok so this thing is just totally random then. I give up.
But is it really? Alas, no. Again. Look:

Suddenly there IS a kind of Meta Symmetry that happened it turned, got into that knot bit
there and then it exits again in a perfectly symmetrical version, in the same angle, ascending
in size again, absolutely wonderfully retaining the feel of the shapes before - even though those
were already pretty darn complex!

That alone - keeping the character is something that is very, very hard to do! As pointed out
in Part I, I will pose that here again: Much of what I am showing here: if I gave it to you as a task
to draw or design by hand, with paper and pencil, taking as long as you possible want, even
years, .. you would end up looking dilettante by comparison! And yet here it happens to
absolutely effortlessly, balanced, and just right. Every time.
But hey - we are not done yet, by a longshot. Lets follow this through: So we had the feeling of
the new level of symmetry there which implied another level of framework in which one could
say I can characterize this
And just as you gained that, here is what happens if we zoom out slightly to see more of the
forms developing:
There is our center knot of symmetry.. but it turns out to be entirely A-symmetrical on either
side of it !

And if we zoom out a few times further, we can see the entire region and. dang, if that entire
process is not continuing further: both the NOT following the symmetry expectation, as well as
finding yet another level of MetaMeta Symmetry: the above is to be found in the lower left
quadrant here but look how it blossoms up into another large shape, only to reduce itself back
down again and forming another knot:

So now we think.. ok ok ok I get it so there is that pattern of shrinking, knot, reverse

growing, meta symmetry and all is good again. I still GET IT. :) and I think I know what
will happen here :)
Almost as if toying with our assumptions, akin to the old line god is laughing about us making
plans ( not to digress into personified deities and such here ;) ), just as we think we do have
another level of our mental picture what this process will generate next. it well. doesnt :)
Lets have a look:

Again, in the lower left quadrant is the entire previous image

But then it grows ever larger, and then it reduces and reduces further and further into a spiral!
Iterating away to a singular point Why? Who knew?
And as you look at this from the far above birds eye perspective knowing that it is a zoomable
3D depthy construct and NOT just a flat picture - you then realize that the entire shape, that
elephants trunk curling up, is what makes up all the little subshapes to begin with ! It was there
the whole time, dozens of them!
(Which is where one is easily mistaken, as it is millions, and actually infinite numbers of them!
We just cannot grasp that at any one zoom-level so quickly, as we only see a snapshot of one
slice of it)
And of course that is not the end: we zoom out another level of magnitude:

Suddenly there is that radial shape in huge showing up in the right half of our canvas and the
hunch is that those two sides are probably connected somehow
The last zoom out gives us the answer - and shows the entire Julia at full size:

Seen like that, it is rather graspable again Now we can see the entire truth of it being
totally rotationally symmetric ( but without any simple axis that would just mirror things)
As this is how a complete Julia is often shown first, we do start out with that rather simplistic
estimation of having a good understanding and feel for this as a shape and that is how we come
to lack a deeper appreciation of what is really going on in here. Zooming in thousands of times
will bring some of that to light, but one has to be open to that revised description : this is a
HECK of a lot more complex than it looks like at first!
The funny little twirls, that could almost be a crochet doily lace pattern from your grandmaare
just deceptively simple. Let us look one more time up close, and close this chapter with that :
This is what it is all made of:

The radial star shape there, if you count it: has 12 arms that spiral towards its center. But it is
not just 12 fixed rays emanating from a point no, it works very differently: it has ONE arm
that enters INwards ( here at the bottom going straight up) then 10 more go around clockwise
and the twelveth arm is the OUTward bound - it is the one that connects to the next shape
This algorithm : #1 comes in, #2 to #11 are radial arms, #12 leaves again to the next shape
makes up not only the large cluster, but as you look closer you see it in each and every part of it,
everywhere, repeated at all scales, and at all angles !!!
Even in that one small image here, you could not possibly count the occurrences of that, because
you soon realize that even what looks like a single pixel here, will be this entire shape or shapes
of shapes once you zoom in and then you can do it again, and again!
Tom Beddard made many wonderful monochrome studies of such patterns - and Ben Weiss, who
wrote the math engine in Frax, even managed to do what to our knowledge has never been done
before:
As you zoom into many (not all) Julias, you can find virtually identical same-similar copies and
thus zoom into them truly infinitely, in a kind of depth loop ( the auditory equivalent would be a
Shepard tone scale ).
(This can only work in Julia Sets - by comparison the cost of zooming into Mandelbrot Sets gets
ever more expensive to calculate as you get deeper)
And to close off the wonder of wonders about all this, here is something to contemplate still:
This entire complex 3D depth Julia Set. lives inside one single point of the Mandelbrot Set !
The entire M-Set is really a MAP of all the Julias
And if you were to move over, even by a gazillionth of a fraction of the whole width it will be
different !
This is also a point where I have to try to balance out an injustice: Benoit Mandelbrot, defining
his famout Set in the 70s, was not working in parallel with Gaston Julia, who would do the same
with his Julia sets - as is so often implied and assumed in mentioning both in passing, at a glance,
in the same sentence
On the contrary: Benoit was not even born yet ! Gaston Julia predates his work by over 50 years
(!!) as he was doing it smack during WWI, much of it in the hospital after losing his nose,
literally. And it goes without saying that his calculations were done entirely without the use of a
computer of even a calculator - a wooden slide rule was his only tool, and the plots were done
pencil on paper over thousands of hours of his life. (Another mathematician that is so often
overlooked here is Pierre Fatou, a contemporary - and there are numerous others that built the
foundations for all three. Tom Beddard wrote a lovely overview of fractals which you find here.)
At an early TED in the mid 90s I met Benoit several times and had rather confounding
experiences - he almost seemed to resent the graphical depictions ! And sure enough, it was not

him who really popularized even his own set - that title really belongs to another pioneer, Prof.
Heinz-Otto Peitgen in Bremen, Germany, who wrote the seminal book The Beauty of Fractals
and tirelessly promoted the aesthetics to a wider audience, beyond the IBM research work that
Mandelbrot was engaged in. That book, and its sequels, were the inspiration to an entire
generation of geeks, coders, mathematicians, designers - myself (and Tom and Ben) included.
Frax Pro actually has a realtime mapping between these two universes, where you can swipe
along the edge of the MSet and see the equivalent Julia shown in the center, 20 times per second
even on an iPhone ;)
It is called the Shape room, and depicts the fully zoomed out M-Set, shown here at left, and in
its center, the current Julia Set for the corresponding position of the cross hair cursor.

One can then simply swipe with multi-touch gestures to trace the outline of the M-Set, and see
instantly how the Julia corresponds. 16 positions with especially interesting results are shown as
little yellow dots to tap on
As you use that magnifying loupe with the plus symbol at left, you will then enter yet another
room, dedicated for a Deep Zoom at the cross hair cursor: you can then double-tap to fly in
further, pixel-exact on that spot
You can see here that what looked like on the edge for the cursor in the basic Shape room, is

actually somewhere in the middle still once you get way down there and you could go quite
a bit further still.
It is absolutely wonderful to have the tools and the fluid immersion to explore these
relationships. And special shapes have been found this way that probably have not been seen by
anyone before.
That is the wonderful quality of a great tool: with it it is really easy without it, it is
cumbersome, or impossible!
To continue where we left off, the Spanish Inquisition expecting the unexpected.: here is
another detail area, very deep down in another set , this time it is a Mandelbrot:

It seems innocent enough, a series of shapes a bit like little dandelions, connected up in a row
right?
But wait there is more going on here that is worth a second glance, and a third thought. :
Let us zoom in a bit into the center region:

The big black center blod reveals first of all that there is a Mini Mandel (which Julias do not
have) and quite an unusual surrounding for that Unusual also in that the angular irregularitis
have an appearance almost like a Koch flake ( a curious curve which has no tangents :) found
about the same time as Einsteins Annus Mirabilis )
But now look closer: that center shape there has EIGHT arms, the protruding continuations
east and west following with the familiar Oh so now it repeats a bit smaller or something,
right?
But hold on count the arms there!
Suddenly that one has. NINE arms! Damn.
There goes the whole theory of radial symmetry - even numbers, n all ;)
And if you now look at the picture before this, a little closer, you can describe the algorithm
again akin to the Julia further up : Lets count the shape to the left of the center blob:
A FIRST arm enters INWARD, then there are SIX arms that dead-end, and the EIGHT exists,
and a NINTH is another dead-end.
But DAMN.. that does not work either. : the next connected one exits on the SIXTH
instead..and a couple further it is the SECOND arm that continues further with SEVEN deadends in a row after that
So the point here is: there is absolutely no simplicity to this regularity!
It changes directions, angles, lengths, the number of features, the number of connections, the
point of the connection, and on and on and it STILL achieves an overall feeling of total
harmony and naturalness.
It is hard to appreciate the subtle details in this, so easily dismissed at a glance as oh yeah so
what but this is truly a mysterious property: that one tiny formula containing all of this highly

complex behaviour - which is absolutely not random but repeatably chaotic, in infinite detail. A
whole different ballgame from just complex.
To finish up that close-up above, here it where this all lives
zooming out we first find it the center of two connected large wheels.. ( with 9 arms )

The third arm of those connects further, all others are dead-ends :

that is revealed to live on one arm of many, and actually a dead-end one even

The whole thing is in itself

yet another arm - but suddenly we notice the appearance of a Mini Mandel in one of the arms !

And the next zoom stage outward finally gets us to the real edge of the M-Set :

And there we have the final Mandelbrot in full view and we can trace our ancestry to that one
little stalk there in the center

Especially in this stark black and white form, it can easily just woosh by as some squiggley
shapes, but hopefully you got to see here that there is indeed a lot more to it than that. Small
details of wonder and peculiar changes abound, everywhere.
To reconnect to the beginning, here is another detail look at an irregular fissure line, deep
within Julia Set:

Aside from the seemingly erratice meandering behaviour, it shows a second aspect worth noting:
the floating shapes here, a bit like pillows with little twirly spiral corners These exist at
almost every size from the very largest ( in the upper left corner) to the tiniest ones ( which by
now you do expect: are infinitely smaller than a single pixel here. ;)

They do converge to the smaller form in two ways: once along the crooked line as one gets
closer to that, the shapes get reduced rapidly. And towards the spiral centers, they too suck them
in like black (here white) holes.
Here is another example at a fissure crack, with the feature sizes reduced in diameter as they
approach the edge:

It is also an interesting case showing the nature of Frax: using the fields in-between the lines to
fill them with a complex texture, raise them in 3D height, and light them with two glossy,
reflective light sources.
The same area as plain normal fractals would only show the actual lines ( boundary limits,
really ):

It is not just a bit more fun to have the 3D glossy droplets in piano-lacquer black up there it
also tells the other side of the story! Those pillow shapes with twirly spiral edges are essentially
invisible in the simple view!
The important aspect here was that the fractals tend to always distribute all shapes to be present
at all size scales! This is a very serious concept - one that you can find in real nature abundantly!
Next time you are in the shower, just look at the water droplets on the tiles, you will find them in
varying sizes, interspersed perfectly evenly uneven, filling the space irregularly, but feeling,
well. natural.
As obvious and simplistic as that may appear to you there and then - there was no way to
describe this kind of behaviour mathematically for a very long time.

Not that the M and J sets are practical descriptions in math terms, no one is making that claim
here - but they are a fountain of concrete visible examples of such complex processes, and
rigorously exact.
Btw, there is no need for any lines to converge on, here is a field doing it without :

The clean distribution of sizes will continue as you zoom in, that is another aspect here: we are
always seeing only a 2D slice of a 3D object !
Really this feeds right into the next topic the whole zoo of shapes that can happen.
But that will be Part 3.