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The Science of Fractal Images
Peitgen & Saupe (eds.)
The book that helped turn fractals from a mathematical curiosity into a visual phenomenon. Edited by Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Dietmar Saupe and drawing on a who's-who of the field, it lays out — rigorously, but with the pictures always in view — how those hypnotic images of the Mandelbrot set, fractal mountains, and branching forms are actually computed. There are chapters on the algorithms behind the famous zooms, on Michael Barnsley's iterated function systems, and on the random fractals that generate startlingly convincing landscapes and clouds, with a contribution from Benoit Mandelbrot himself. It is a technical book, for readers comfortable with mathematics and code, but it sits at a rare crossroads of mathematics, computer graphics, and visual art — and it captures the exact moment those worlds collided.
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The book
An edited volume published by Springer-Verlag in 1988, it grew directly out of a course — "Fractals: introduction, basics, and perspectives" — given at SIGGRAPH '87, the major computer-graphics conference. That origin is the key to its character: it was the first book to treat fractals purely from the point of view of computer graphics. The contributors are a roll-call of the field: Peitgen and Saupe (the editors), Richard Voss on random fractals and fractal landscapes, Michael Barnsley on iterated function systems, and Robert Devaney on the dynamics of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets, with a chapter by Benoit Mandelbrot, whose 1982 The Fractal Geometry of Nature had lit the fuse.
The moment
It landed just as desktop computing was making these images widely reproducible, and it served as both a serious technical manual and a bridge to a fascinated general public — the working companion to the coffee-table fractal art of the same years.
How it has aged
The mathematics is timeless and the algorithms still run; only the computing context and the sense of first discovery are datably late-1980s. It remains a landmark reference for how those images are actually made.
For more context
Mandelbrot's own The Fractal Geometry of Nature; and Peitgen and Peter Richter's lavish The Beauty of Fractals.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Peitgen & Saupe (eds.)
- Publisher
- Springer
- Place of publication
- New York; Berlin; Heidelberg
- Year
- 1988
- ISBN
- 0-387-96608-0
- Format
- Hardcover
- Shelf
- Science
- Location
- Maine
First edition; contributors incl. Mandelbrot, Barnsley, Voss, Devaney