Pearly Mandelbrot iPhone Case

I discovered the exquisite beauty and fascinating world of fractals and the Mandelbrot set in the early 80's - just a few years after it was first described by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot - when it was featured in a computer magazine I read. Along with the article came a Basic program that after a whole day's running on our first home computer could produce the first 48 iterations of the Mandelbrot set in 16 colours in 480x360 pixel resolution - if it hadn't crashed along the way. It could not save the picture, but what appeared on the screen was beautiful. Computing has indeed come a long way since then, and yesterday, I discovered what is probably the most lovely implementation of this beauty where imaginary numbers meet real ones and create infinite detail in the iPad app Frax. It is also in many ways the best iPad app I have seen in how it uses the touch interface to the full to control one's journey into this wonderful world. As lovely as the detail is, one of my very first images was this, the entire Mandelbrot enveloped in a pearlescent metallic sheen as if we're looking at a tiny detail of mother-of-pearl inside a shell - and it might as well have been in how nature creates wonderful repeating patterns too as you look at it in different scales. Seeing the set in its entirety is like looking at the fascinating beauty of a globe before commencing on a journey around the world.