Unknown fractal
Centreville NS, Canada 1998
Mostly likely created with FractInt

Mathematics

Fractals

I use to spend a lot of my computer CPU cycles generating fractals, but I am not very active with fractals currently. I am the former editor of sci.fractals FAQ (archive).

Humm. The above web pages are no longer available because fractal.mta.ca has been cut off. The fractal archive was generating about 1.5GB of traffic per week and because I am no longer official involved with the (academic) host, fractal.mta.ca was decommissioned in 1999.

I have an archive copy of the sci.fractals FAQ, but not the >2GB image archive, on this server. If I was to reopen the fractal archive I would make it database driven to allow flexibility and expandability, and allow users contribute their own images using their web browser.

Two of my favorite sites for fractals and information about fractals are Jean-Pierre Louvet fractales site and Noel Giffin's Spanky fractal database (mirrored at spanky.fractint.org) One of the more powerful (but not as pretty) fractal generators is FractInt (or FractInt).

Primes and number theory

During the course of my studies I became quite interested in prime numbers, factoring, and related topics which are referred to as "Number Theory". This interest is from the fact that both number theory and large primes playing a major role in modern cryptography (the basis of most public key encryption systems), and the elegance & difficulty of number theory, where a child can understand the proof to a critical theorm, but can ask a question which cannot be answered to date. Such as: Are there an infinite number of twin primes? For more information on prime numbers check out Chris Caldwell's Prime Pages which are great fun.

Distributed computing

I've used my computer's idle CPU time towards The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) as wells Distributed.net's efforts to brute force DES (DES-II-1 & DES-III), and RC5 (56, and currently 64). I almost contributed to NFSNet in their previous efforts to find factors for their "ten most wanted" composite numbers, but had problems (lack of sendmail on the machines I wanted to use). I am planning to contribute to NFSnet in the near future. I think these projects are more rewarding then watching some chessey screen saver. Although SETI@home has a cool screensaver.

Eric Weisstein's Mathworld is now back online. Thanks Eric and Wolfram Research.

Lambda c * fn(z)
Cambridge, England 2000
Ultra Fractal

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Text copyright 1998-2001 M Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
Images copyright 1998, 2000 M Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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