Fractals in Go
Most likely you’ve already heard of Fractals, a term coined by mathematician Benoit Mandlebrot, to describe a family of shapes that resemble the irregularities found in nature and whose degree of irregularity is consistent at any scale. The complexity of this self-similarity can be measured by Fractal Dimension. The Mandelbrot set, named after Dr. Mandelbrot, is probably the most famous set of complex numbers that most people associate with the term “Fractal.” However, many shapes in the natural realm are now considered fractals and predate Mandelbrot, well known curves from 19th century mathematicians Koch, Peano, and Sierpenski, to name a few. These shapes did not fit into the Euclidean or Newtonian patterns that ruled their day and so were considered pathological monsters at the time. Mandelbrot gave them all a name and unified them as a legitimate area of mathematics.
Above image from Ch. 3, Go Programming Language.
This paper focuses on a technique for creating line drawn fractal shapes, L-systems. The ‘L’ in L-systems stands for Lindenmayer, as in Aristid Lindenmayer, the Hungarian biologist who created the formal language…
