Russell's Blog

I was up late last night while waiting for the laundry to finish drying, and was annoyed at myself for wasting time fooling around on the internet. So, I decided to try to remember how to plot the Julia set. I vaguely remember doing this in high school, so I turned off my wireless card (so I couldn't cheat) and timed myself to see how long it would take me to figure it out.

After 11 minutes I got this. Not bad. It's not the most efficient way of plotting it, and I didn't bother to use modular arithmetic to handle big numbers (that's why I only go to six iterations). Here is my (very stupid) Julia set calculator.

#!/usr/bin/env python
# vim: set ts=4 sw=4 et:
from numpy import *
from scipy import *
from pylab import *

def julia( l, I, M ) :
    a = zeros( (I,I), Float64 )
    for i in range(I) :
        for j in range(I) :
            N = complex(-2.0+i/(0.25*I),-2.0+j/(0.25*I))
            for m in range(M) :
                try :
                    N = (N)**2+l
                except OverflowError :
                    N = 10000000000.0
                    break
            a[i,j] = abs(N)
    return a

l = complex( 0.4, 0.3 )
a = julia( l, 200, 6)
contourf( log(a), 32 )
colorbar()
#contour( a, [1], colors='black' )
show()