Vintage-Style Map of the Mandelbrot Set via Kottke [Shared]
Bill Tavis designed this lovely vintage-style map of the familiar fractal shape, the Mandelbrot set. He is selling a poster version of the map, starting at the very reasonable price of $24. I don’t usually highlight the price on this sort of thing, but an unauthorized seller on Amazon was selling poor-quality counterfeits of the map and even though it wasn’t his fault, Tavis offered to replace any of the crappy maps for free. Great map, and apparently a great human who made it.
https://welchwrite.com/blog/2025/04/26/vintage-style-map-of-the-mandelbrot-set-via-kottke-shared/
![Preface
L-systems are a mathematical formalism which was proposed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 as a foundation for an axiomatic theory of development. The notion promptly attracted the attention of computer scientists, who investigated L-systems from the viewpoint of formal language theory. This theoretical line of research was pursued very actively in the seventies, resulting in over one thousand publications. A different research direction was taken in 1984 by Alvy Ray Smith, who proposed L-systems as a tool for synthesizing realistic images of plants and pointed out the relationship between L-systems and the concept of fractals introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot. The work by Smith inspired our studies of the application of L-systems to computer graphics. Originally, we were interested in two problems:
• Can L-systems be used as a realistic model of plant species found in nature?
• Can L-systems be applied to generate images of a wide class of fractals?
It turned out that both questions had affirmative answers. Subsequently we found that L-systems could be applied to other areas, such as the generation of tilings, reproduction of a geometric art form from East India, and synthesis of musical scores based on an interpretation of fractals. This book collects our results related to the graphical applications of 1systems. It is a corrected version of the notes which we prepared for the ACM SIGGRAPH '88 course on fractals. [...]](https://media.ciberlandia.pt/ciberlandia-media/media_attachments/files/114/359/648/324/216/418/original/5afad812e0de7c99.png "Preface
L-systems are a mathematical formalism which was proposed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 as a foundation for an axiomatic theory of development. The notion promptly attracted the attention of computer scientists, who investigated L-systems from the viewpoint of formal language theory. This theoretical line of research was pursued very actively in the seventies, resulting in over one thousand publications. A different research direction was taken in 1984 by Alvy Ray Smith, who proposed L-systems as a tool for synthesizing realistic images of plants and pointed out the relationship between L-systems and the concept of fractals introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot. The work by Smith inspired our studies of the application of L-systems to computer graphics. Originally, we were interested in two problems:
• Can L-systems be used as a realistic model of plant species found in nature?
• Can L-systems be applied to generate images of a wide class of fractals?
It turned out that both questions had affirmative answers. Subsequently we found that L-systems could be applied to other areas, such as the generation of tilings, reproduction of a geometric art form from East India, and synthesis of musical scores based on an interpretation of fractals. This book collects our results related to the graphical applications of 1systems. It is a corrected version of the notes which we prepared for the ACM SIGGRAPH '88 course on fractals. [...]")
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