There are many dangers in leaving polite society behind and wandering into dark neglected places where science and mathematics commingle with art. Just one example: you might catch fractals. But having already had a case of fractals in high school - really, the worse possible time - I am not too embarrassed to have contracted them again now.

Fractals are still cool, and if 1987 wants them back, it can't have them.

The fractal at right is called Barnsley's Fern. It was drawn by four equations. All each equation does it take a point in space as input, and based on it, pick a new point in space as output. The fractal drawing program finds the output point in the picture and tints it a tiny bit greener than it was before. Then the output point is fed into one of the four equations again, selected at random. Repeat a few million times and the fern shape, all its fine shading, everything, just emerges automatically as a result.

Imagine a very strange hall of very strange mirrors. Somewhere in the hall is a single pale green speck. The infinite images of the speck in all the mirrors together make this fern. Now notice that each leaflet is a smaller copy of the whole fern. And each leaflet's leaflet. And so on. Find the tiniest, faintest leaflet at all visible in the image. It will be just a pale green speck, the same pale green speck we started with. But if you could zoom in, you would find that pale green speck is another whole fern.

Michael Barnsley designed his fern by carefully selecting parameters for each of the four equations until he liked how it looked. Fractal Fernishings lets you change these parameters interactively to grow your own species of fern.

Grow some ferns!

(Fractal Fernishings is a Java applet and may require a few seconds to load. If you see a permission box, be assured it's completely safe to allow the applet to run.)