Julia morph

Fractals have been around for almost a century. Gaston Julia was a French mathematician who studied the Julia set during the twenties. His work was not given attention until the development of computer graphics which could actually visualize the set.

Benoit B Mandelbrot was among the first to develop computer programs to print fractals and is largely responsible for the contemporary interest in fractals worldwide.

The so-called Julia set has a close relation to the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is the set of complex numbers to which there are continuous Julia sets. The morph is created in real-time by changing the constant value in the complex iteration procedure, thus creating different Julia sets.

I wrote this code in Java during November 2000. Everything is done in real-time so run this applet on a reasonably fast computer. I got approx 50 fps on my Pentium 733 MHz CPU, but it still runs with a decent frame rate on slower CPUs.

I made a similar program back in 1994 using assembly language on a 16 MHz Motorola 68000 CPU, which actually felt faster than this one.

Update: Java Applets are no longer supported in web browsers for security reasons, so the demo will be hard to run.