Cooking Recipes for Fractals

Cooking as an activity is known to be one of the oldest cultural techniques of mankind. However, this book is not about edible things for which there are recipes. The activity of programming can also be considered a cultural technique.

Recipes are known to be concise yet effective descriptions of steps that lead to success.

Our cooking recipes listed here create visual meals. These are computer graphics that look beautiful and elegant.

You can hang such graphics on the wall or send them in postcard size for various occasions.

These are certainly special cards that are guaranteed to spark interesting inquiries from the recipients.

So, if you're looking to produce unique, beautiful images for empty walls, greeting cards, or other spectacular artifacts (3D printing, cutting plotters, etc.), you've found the right - and artistically interesting - topic: fractal computer graphics.

And in terms of programming, we will equip them with a well-functioning toolkit of short code snippets, the source code of the programs, which they can work with.

If one doesn't want to type out the source code of the programs, it's easier to scan both parts of the QR code using a smartphone or tablet and send it to oneself via email. The two parts will, of course, need to be combined in a text editor. The complete file thus created can then be compiled, for example, using the Thonny development environment to generate the images of the computer graphics.

In-depth derivations of the underlying mathematical formulas and discussions of alternative approaches will not be covered.

That's why we call this offering "recipes." Two interesting topics are thus defined:

engaging with fractal structures and applying a programming language to generate computer graphics.

As soon as you have mastered the basic recipe, it is of course also permitted to make small(!) changes. We also want to expressly encourage you to do so.

We are convinced that your experiments will lead to first successes and further developments.

We have chosen the Python programming language because it offers many interesting additional libraries that facilitate visualization, i.e., the production of computer graphics.

Have fun with your cooking, experiments with computer graphics and learning an interesting programming language. Enjoy it!