The Fractal Microscope

Introduction

The Fractal Microscope is a tool for exploring the Mandelbrot set and other fractals. The fractals you will be exploring are mathematical sets with extremely intricate and beautiful structure (so beautiful, in fact, that people using it have refused to believe that it had anything to do with mathematics!).

What makes this a microscope?

The microscopes we encounter in a laboratory are tools for getting a closer look at something we want to know more about. We put a specimen on a slide and look at it. [an

Often we will see something that we want to look at more closely, so we use a higher powered lens to zoom in on that detail.

The Fractal Microscope starts out with what you might call a pre-loaded slide that has a "specimen" on it known as the Mandlebrot set. As we look at this set we can see that, especially around the edges of the black area, there seems to be some detailed structure. What would that look like if we zoomed in on it? That is the kind of question that the Fractal Microscope is designed to answer.

Think of this as a remote control microscope with an extremely powerful set of lenses that allow fantastic magnifications. You are the scientist controlling the microscope, and your job is to find out all you can about the structure of the mathematical "specimen".

What can it do?

You can

Zoom in on part of the picture by choosing a magnification (2x, 4x, or 8x) and then clicking on the location you want to take a closer look at
Zoom back out, again by specifying how much you want to "unmagnify" and then clicking on the location for the new center
Enter your own coordinates to view a select part of the Mandelbrot Set
View the orbits created by the actual calculation of the points in the Mandelbrot Set
Explore another fractal altogether (change specimens, so to speak)

Start exploring with the fractal microscope