This is a sequel to an earlier post: To bead, or not to bead.
In that post my daughter Kayla and I did a fuse bead picture of the Fibonacci spiral, and we talked about how it can be used to give a geometric proof to the sum of the squares of the first n Fibonacci numbers is the product of the n-th and (n+1)-st Fibonacci numbers.
Today we want to share our most recent project:
Hopefully you can recognize the Mandelbrot set, though it pains me that it wasn’t quite to scale. We were hanging out in Paresky selling girl scout cookies (email me at [email protected] if you want to buy some cookies, or if you and your friends would like some fuse beads for a project), and this took from roughly 3pm to a bit before 7pm (when fortunately majors Alyssa Epstein and Sarah Fleming helped fill the final color; if others helped on this and not Kayla’s elephant please let me know so I can add thanks). I quickly eyeballed where things should be from the picture on the right; it’s at least more colorful than one of the original pictures.
Here are some great videos zooming in:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEw8xpb1aRA
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jGaio87u3A
- https://vimeo.com/6035941 (my favorite, and my son Cam’s as well)
There are many websites you can visit to learn more about this set.
- http://math.bu.edu/eap/DYSYS/FRACGEOM/index.html
- http://aleph0.clarku.edu/~djoyce/julia/julia.html
- http://www.math.cornell.edu/~lipa/mec/lesson5.html
I’m currently working on a book celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pi Mu Epsilon with my colleague and friend, Stephan Garcia of Pomona College; a rough draft of the chapter involving the Mandelbrot set is here: pme100_BOOK_mandelbrot (comments welcome).