Was the Mandelbrot set discovered in the 13th century ?

[bib]

http://www.raygirvan.co.uk/apoth/udo.htm

funny hoax !

[HPDZ]

Yeah, it was made as an April fool joke by a science writer a while back. The first time I read it, it really had me, I have to admit. It seemed feasible:

120x120 is 14400 pixels. In a 3x3-sized area in the complex number plane centered on (0,0), with a max count of 70, the average number of iterations is about 30. That's about 430,000 iterations all together.

If you spent 9 years doing this 16 hours per day, 6 days a week (I assume Sunday would have been off-limits), you'd have to do about 9.6 iterations per hour. Each iteration is only three multiplications and three additions (one of which is really a x2), so this might just be possible if you have a few highly dedicated friends helping.

 

[bib]

It really had me too ! In fact I found the link in Mandelbrot's Yale's courses, not sure if they told it was an April fool joke...