The Mandelbulb "The original Mandelbrot is an amazing object that has captured the public's imagination for 30 years. It's found by following a relatively simple math formula. But in the end, it's still only 2D and flat - there's no depth, shadows, perspective, or light sourcing. What we have featured in this article is a potential 3D version of the same fractal."
posted by dhruva on Nov 12, 2009 - 115 comments

Quest for a true 3D Mandelbrot Fractal - a very nice exploration of Mandelbrot/Julia set fractals in various kinds of 3D space.
posted by loquacious on Sep 14, 2008 - 21 comments

Mathematicians create videos that help in visualizing four-dimensional objects. Science News writes about it: seeing in four dimensions.
posted by Surfin' Bird on Aug 24, 2008 - 26 comments

How deep does the rabbit hole go? The Ultimate Fractal Video Project features animated zooms into the famous Mandelbrot Set. Some zoom in so far that, by the end of the dive, the first frame you had viewed would be as large as (or larger than) the known universe. | The animations are offered as .zip'd WMV files; lower-quality versions are viewable on FractAlkemist's YouTube page. [more inside]
posted by not_on_display on Jul 29, 2008 - 13 comments

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb is out. Reviews in the Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Financial Times. Just in time with those of us with a love of Hume's problem of induction, non-Gaussian distributions and financial intellectualism. Read an early draft of chapter 16, The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud. Read Taleb's "philisophical and literary notebook." Then, in a feat of metanarrative rarely seen outside of Metatalk, read his comments on comments on the book. Previously on Metafilter: Languagehat has already made his thoughts on Taleb known, it wasn't pretty, and someone with "vested interests in Taleb" responded. Taleb, refreshingly, does not shy away from debates about his work.
posted by geoff. on Apr 30, 2007 - 66 comments

A Mandelbrot zoom that is much larger than our known universe.
Previously mentioned here, but it deserves its own mention. Via.
posted by the Real Dan on Apr 2, 2007 - 137 comments

A talk with Benoît Mandelbrot, entitled Fractals in Science, Engineering and Finance (Roughness and Beauty) [video, 80mins, realplayer] about fractals as A Theory of Roughness.
posted by MetaMonkey on Dec 3, 2006 - 5 comments

What will be the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the next 50 years? As part of their 50th anniversary celebration, the New Scientist asked 70 prominent minds for ideas on the subject. You can read the thoughts of scientists like Freeman Dyson, Benoit Mandelbrot and Jane Goodall individually, or browse by topic. For example, eight thinkers have something to say about alien life. The links to browse by topic can be found at the beginning of the main link. Also, compare with this thread about similar predictions from 1950.
posted by jeffmshaw on Nov 19, 2006 - 89 comments

Mandelbrot explorer 20th century Dutch mathemeticians are cool. http://www.ddewey.net/mandelbrot/
posted by longsleeves on May 24, 2005 - 21 comments

The Buddhabrot Set is a re-visualization of the Mandelbrot Set, created with a rendering technique invented by Melinda Green, who further extended it to create the Buddhagram. [Via MonkeyFilter.]
posted by homunculus on Feb 4, 2004 - 15 comments