"Mandelbulb," a 3D Mandlebrot Construct, Discovered

symbolset writes "Many know the beauty and complexity of the Mandelbrot set. For some years now a few enterprising mathematicians / rendering fiends have been seeking a true 3D Mandelbrot set. A month ago a solution was found, and it is awesome to behold."

Comments

A sad day indeed...

[symbolset]

If that's the case, it's been a sad day since at least 1984. These things teach us interesting things about numbers and are interesting in and of themselves. As a way of making math more visually beautiful they also serve to draw the interest of youth to a field ordinarily seen as dry and boring.

Re:Actually, the Mandelbrot set is already 4D

[Garble Snarky]

I was following the fractalforums thread for a while, and IIRC that is what a lot of the discussion focused on - "how can we define the squaring operation in 3D such that the Mandelbrot iterative equation gives us something like our vague notion of what we want the Mandelbulb to look like?"

Site is down, but I got an email notification from fractalforums a few days ago, and they had some incredible results. The pursuit is at least as much aesthetic as it is mathematical, and in that respect they've succeeded marvelously.

Re:Actually, the Mandelbrot set is already 4D

[maxwell demon]

People who say they see 3-D crack me up, since the back of the eye is a 2-D surface.

But most people have two eyes, and the parallax between them gives the third dimension.