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Poll
Question: How old were you when you were introduced to fractals?
Less than ten years old - 5 (17.9%)
10 - 20 years old - 12 (42.9%)
20 - 30 years old - 9 (32.1%)
30 - 40 years old - 1 (3.6%)
40 - 50 years old - 1 (3.6%)
50 - 60 years old - 0 (0%)
60 - 70 years old - 0 (0%)
More than 70 years old - 0 (0%)
Total Voters: 28

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Author Topic: How old were you when you were introduced to fractals?  (Read 14062 times)
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greentexas
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« on: November 08, 2016, 02:03:40 AM »

Not trying to brag, but I was introduced to fractals when I was six! I didn't take pictures of fractals until I was eight, and didn't make Mandelbrot zooms until I was ten. I'm 12 now.
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TheRedshiftRider
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« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2016, 07:21:16 AM »

I have seen young people getting into fractals but not as young as eight! It's pretty good to get into fractals very early.

I think I found out about fractals when I was about 13 years old. Joined the forums when I was 15 years old.
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Sabine
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« Reply #2 on: November 08, 2016, 09:46:37 AM »

Got my first computer in 1988 (we already had floppies then, Big floppies...) and almost immediately came across a little program on a BBS in a group interested in AI with which you could manipulate strange attractors and also an IFS-generator in BASIC :} Found them mesmerizing and wonderfully weird and very soon (probably 1989) found fract386 (later became fractint). So you could say I was introduced to fractals at the earliest possible age (because prior to that it was hardly possible to get visualized  representations of the mandelbrot set :}), and that was at 27 :}
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DarkBeam
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« Reply #3 on: November 08, 2016, 10:22:09 AM »

I was 14 I think and it was 1997. Almost nobody had internet back then the only way to get software was to buy cds. wink I went to a friend's home for some months he had internet but it was so slow. Another era. smiley
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lycium
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« Reply #4 on: November 08, 2016, 02:15:30 PM »

I was <= 8 years old discovering FractInt on an ancient 386 in a freezing cold office in Indonesia, also another era... Later I would prank my mom by leaving it in the background doing the palette cycling thing, which on Windows 3.11 for Workgroups would palette cycle the whole operating system's display cheesy

Joined the forum almost exactly 10 years ago in October 2006, shortly after Michael Barnsley joined (in the hopes of actually getting to speak with him), pre-Mandelbulb days smiley

greentexas, you write really well for being only 12! In particular you might be the only person on the internet under the age of 30 who still writes "I'm" instead of "Im" tongue stuck out
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taurus
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« Reply #5 on: November 08, 2016, 03:52:35 PM »

It must have been around '90, after buying my first Atari Mega ST and reading about a strange thing called chaos theory. My main interest were the philosohical implications of that theory and later the aesthetic impact of fractal imagery. A fact, that basically didn't change until today. I was 24 back then.
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tit_toinou
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« Reply #6 on: November 08, 2016, 04:35:24 PM »

Wow you're very young greentexas smiley . It's a very good thing to have a real goal when learning Computer Science and Mathematics, fractals are perfect for that matter.

My dad and my brother showed me Mandelbrots when I was ~13 and I used to code IFS on my TI-83 with the chaos game algorithm smiley .
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greentexas
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« Reply #7 on: November 08, 2016, 06:18:55 PM »

Wow, lycium! You were pretty young! It's great to know that there are plenty of people that were older than about my age when they were introduced to the M-set. I guess the fractal community has more kids than I thought. Up until now, I often stereotyped your run-of-the-mill 10-year old as thinking fractals are boring. They are not!

I recently showed my parents a Mandelbrot zoom I created this morning. I don't think I'm the only person that uses good grammar on the Internet, but those people are a rarity.
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lkmitch
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« Reply #8 on: November 08, 2016, 06:32:14 PM »

I was introduced to fractals through the August 1985 issue of Scientific American about the Mandelbrot set.  I was 24 and wrote my own programs in FORTRAN and BASIC.
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greentexas
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« Reply #9 on: December 26, 2016, 08:09:29 PM »

I have seen young people getting into fractals but not as young as eight! It's pretty good to get into fractals very early.

I think I found out about fractals when I was about 13 years old. Joined the forums when I was 15 years old.

I think it's pretty good too. First of all, kids that like fractals are rare. They aren't as rare as an astatine goblet, but they are quite a shocker. I have tried to introduce fractals to some of my friends. Many of them aren't too interested because fractals are math-related. I would probably think fractals were boring if I wasn't as good at math as I am now.

It's also nice to learn early because a young mind can be full of ideas. I have actually created a few puns/jokes about fractals, one of which is actually slightly rude. I am mostly interested in the architecture of fractals and how they relate to the formulas of the fractals themselves. It also allows you to easily become one of the big guns on Fractal Forums in the matter of a few years.
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ellarien
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« Reply #10 on: December 26, 2016, 09:07:04 PM »

I remember being introduced to the Mandelbrot set and the bifurcation tree - rendered on an early-1980s BBC microcomputer, so you can imagine how slow and clunky that was  -- as an undergraduate. But I didn't really get hooked until I was nearly fifty, by which time my phone could do far faster and nicer renders than that BBC machine!
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panzerboy
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« Reply #11 on: December 27, 2016, 11:30:39 AM »

I was at least 19, maybe 20. A workmate had the famous 1985 August Scientific American magazine, possibly from a library so it was months maybe up a year after August 1985. He had coded up a slow text graphics Mandelbrot using the Pick Databasic we used for database manipulation. He asked me "You know C, could you make a faster hi res version?". That was my first mandelbrot program, in Microsoft C version 2.0. It could do a low res 80x48 16 colour mandelbrot for exploration. A mode switch to 320x200 CGA 4 colour for the 'presentation' version. You saved the video memory and reloaded in the program, I hadn't heard of any picture formats, GIF was maybe 2 years away. I might have investigated long floating point but this was very slow on the IBM AT (286) we were using. The 286 didn't have hardware floating point. It could take hours to generate a "HiRes" image, we generally left it running overnight.
A few years later I had an Acorn Archimedes, 32 bit RISC the original ARM processor. I altered a magazine Mandelbrot ARM Assembler routine to do full 32 bit integer, needed 64 bits to store the product, then 48 bit.

Jeremy Thomson
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quaz0r
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« Reply #12 on: December 27, 2016, 11:43:31 AM »

i was a zygote when i first got into fractals.  i walked 10 miles in the snow, and i calculated them by hand with pencil and paper!
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freakiebeat
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« Reply #13 on: December 27, 2016, 01:10:24 PM »

I was 26 back in 1988 when I first used fractint on a 4.77 MHz MS-DOS based machine... how time flies!!
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jwm-art
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« Reply #14 on: January 23, 2017, 11:39:59 PM »

Around 1990 at the age of 15 or maybe earlier. Fractal lines with midpoint displacement on an Amstrad CPC. Can remember not having the patience waiting for the Amstrad CPC compute the M-Set. Wasn't until I got my first PC a 25mhz 486sx with "true colour" video and Fractint that really started to see what they were, and the book Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos by John Briggs. Explored 3d mountain landscapes with an early version of "Vista Pro" I got off the front of some magazine.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2017, 11:54:31 PM by jwm-art » Logged
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