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w h y   a d   i n f i n i t u m?

I am, as you may have guessed, a fractal fanatic. I wasn’t always like this. In fact, when I was younger I despised math passionately: the plug-and-chug of elementary arithmetic infuriated me. Back then numbers were lifeless things, stricken, lying there on the page like so many dull pebbles.

Only later in my education, when I began to dip my toes in the cool waters of conceptual math, did it begin to interest me. Algebra made sense, in a way. Graphs caught my eye. I started to wonder whether there was something there after all.

Then, during the summer before ninth grade, I sat on the deck of a sailboat beside an artist friend of my father’s and listened to him describing the waves’ surface. Wavelets upon wavelets upon wavelets. They were a special kind of shape, he told me: they were fractals. I rolled the word around a bit. Fractals. Cool.

Nothing came of it until school started. My geometry teacher assigned us a project: research and present to the class an area of art that involves math. My friends researched Escher, pointillism, Kandinsky. I researched fractals. The art was beautiful, so I decided to put some on my poster. To give it a personal touch I decided to make the art myself. I downloaded my first fractal generator and began fiddling around. Instantly I was hooked.

I’d found math I could love. Fractals brought the numbers to life. The dull stone carvings grew wings and soared.

Before long my family and friends caught wind of my new pastime and wanted to see it. Everyone who saw my work and heard me explain it was enchanted. I wanted to share: I had found joy in my work. Why not spread the smiles?

So I built a website. It was a little thing at first: just a few pages on a free web host. It grew as I did. The rest is history.

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