the mandlebulb will explode your brain

Check out the huge heap of awesome that is the mandlebulb or 3d mandlebrot set.  Read the whole story over here at this very strange skytopia project page.   It seems to have been the brainchild and 20 year quest of Rudy Rucker, which he writes about over on his blog, and also over here at fractal forums, where “the elite meet to geek”. There is some math in both places for people who are interested in how this thing was derived.

The quick summary is that this is a mandlebrot set in intersection with both the xy plane and the xz plane.  The math had been around for 20 years but generating fuzzy results which seem to have sharpened up when they changed the exponent from 2 to higher orders.  8 seems to have generated the most impressive results.

I think the images speak for themselves.