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).It's a nice documentary, though. Highly recommend it. They even have an interview with Benoit Mandelbrot himself, may he rest in peace.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.)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.So Kudos to the author. Tackling the Mandelbrot set has the dual advantage of being interesting and 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?[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhabrot