I was thinking lately besides the image galleries themselves also about how the other sections of the site will be, like the tutorials and articles about fractals I might include here. I am not a mathematician myself, and as I’ve mentioned somewhere else, I am more interested in the artistic and visual part of the fractal world and I have never studied them from that scientific point of view, nor am I able to write anything technical myself about them. My experience would be more in the graphical aspects and maybe in the operational part of certain softwares – how to get a better printable image, how to fix a few things, how to achieve some feature in a software… but nothing beyond this point. But… sometimes a few concepts should be understood even if briefly – if you want to go deeper or not, it’s up to you – so some of your fractal creations can be a little better understood as well so to speak if you know even a little about what is happening, as in “why a certain image has more details than others?” or “why does this formula X give me all these spirals?”, “why is there a black spot in my image?” and so on.
There are many more talented people mostly in the mathematical/scientific side of the fractal world that have written articles and made countless websites describing what are fractals, how do they “behave”, chaos theory, their applications in several aspects of science and they have made articles in a way that I would never be able to do, mostly in the technical side. I will try to sometimes replicate some of these ideas and concepts (always quoting the original authors!) and occasionally I’ll try to add simpler posts about specific subjects in the fractal world like for instance “what are iterations?”, but in a very brief and simple way, the way how I understood that subject so to speak and in a way that I could pass it along that others would also comprehend these concepts, but with additional supporting links to these more deeper articles for the visitors that are more interested in the technical aspects of the fractals, which is not usually my cup of tea for my lack of advanced skills in mathematics or just because they are too nerdy for my tastes and start to get boring after a while if you’re not a scientist, amateur or not. I won’t get too deep though (I’ll use a few iterations!), just trying to touch the surface of these subjects, enough for you to understand the basic concepts.
Iterations
The noun iteration comes from the Latin verb iterum, which means “again,” which makes a lot of sense when you consider the meaning of the word, “the act of repeating.” (Source)
- noun doing or saying again; a repeated performance
- noun (computer science) executing the same set of instructions a given number of times or until a specified result is obtained “the solution is obtained by iteration” synonyms: looping
- noun (computer science) a single execution of a set of instructions that are to be repeated “the solution took hundreds of iterations” synonyms: loop type of: physical process, process a sustained phenomenon or one marked by gradual changes through a series of states