The Mandelwat Set
A little more than eight years ago, I came across a nice documentary: "Fractals - The Colors of Inifnity", narrated by Arthur C. Clarke (yes, THE Arthur C. Clarke!), with music provided by Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd; to top it off, I was tripping on LSD for the first time when I saw it, and I had to rewind at least once to check if something I had seen was actually on the screen or just in my head (to my disappointment at the time, it was actually on the screen).<p>It's a nice documentary, though. Highly recommend it. They even have an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot himself, may he rest in peace.<p>Two years after that, I wrote my first Mandelbrot-renderer. First in Python, but that was waaaay too slow, then in C, which was a lot faster (duh!), and then I made it even faster by telling the compiler to use SSE.  (To some, that sounds trivial, but it was something I had never done before.)<p>I have always suspected that it is like a rite of passage, building at least one simple-minded Mandelbrot renderer. I rewrote mine after two more years to take advantage of multiple threads and wrote another one to render the Buddhabrot[1]. Then I remembered an article I had read years before, about the Parallel Virtual Machine, PVM. So, the next weekend, I turned my Mandelbrot renderer into a distributed application.<p>So Kudos to the author. Tackling the Mandelbrot set has the dual advantage of being interesting <i>and</i> you can make pretty pictures along the way. It is great fun, and I learned a few things along the way. What more could I ask for?<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot</a>