I have collected here information about computing the Mandelbrot set.

The mathematics of computing the set can be found in this (53 kB) Adobe Acrobat file. This file also includes some interesting coordinates to start looking at. There are many (infinitely) more.

Also, I wrote a C language program (6 KB) to generate bitmaps of the set. It runs at the DOS/command prompt. You need to provide a text color table named "palette" such as this where red, green, and blue components are specified on each row (i.e., one color per row). You can modify this palette by putting as many, or as few, colors as you want. The program will cycle through those colors. I created this one using an Excel spreadsheet and saving it as space-delimited text. The program will ask for the maximum iterations. Typically, 1000 to 3000 are used, depending upon how "deep" into the set you are (more iterations needed for a clearly defined set boundary, the deeper you go).

A DOS/Windows executable of this can be found here (41 KB). It doesn't install any other files or modify the registry. It was compiled with GCC (DJGPP).

P. David Buchan
December 31, 2004
david@pdbuchan.com