Halfway down the Danube

Gaston Julia

Today is the 111th birthday of Gaston Julia, the great mathematician and creator of the famous Julia fractals. Google is celebrating this with a neat little decoration on their logo.

Why is this worth mentioning?

Well, I remember my brother writing his High School graduation paper in physics on the iteration of a rational function f in 1987. Back then, the whole craze about what in German we called "Apfelmännchen" -- apple manikins -- was just about to start. My brother told me that I could impress anybody by calling them "Julia fractals" or "Mandelbrot fractals" instead, Mandelbrot being the mathematician who re-discovered Julia's work and put the function into a computer in the 1970s.

I also remember him calculating fractals on his Commodore-64 computer, then printing them out on the needle printer at school. Boy, those calculations took days! How things have changed in over 15 years. Today, you can download the pictures from the internet in seconds.

Courtesy of www.nd.edu/~jmoody/fract/

Apropos of nothing whatsoever connected with the Balkans.

Posted by claudia at February 3, 2004 11:24 AM