Mathematics and Art

Dave inspired me to look up some sites about Mandelbrot sets. I especially like this Java Mandelbrot generator and the Mandelbrot Explorer. Both let you zoom into a Mandelbrot set and select what part you want to see. Here’s a short introduction to Julia and Mandelbrot sets and some more pictures.

Want to know who Mandelbrot and Julia are? See their biographies: Benoit Mandelbrot, Gaston Julia.

Titanwurz – Giant titan

The bud opened yesterday at 5 pm! It turned out that this year’s giant titan in Bonn is the third largest ever in a botanical garden, and it’s 257 cm tall. The largest was not the one in New York – obviously they had trouble converting inches to cm. The largest flower with 267 cm grew in Wageningen, Netherlands, in 1932 while the one that grew in New York, USA, in 1937 was only 256,5 cm and thus 5 mm smaller than the one in Bonn.

This weekend, the Botanical garden has extra-long opening hours so that many people can come and see the giant titan. Maybe I’ll go and have a look myself – although the titan is supposed to stink awfully…

I took the photo from the Botanical Garden‘s news page.