Winter has a funny way of gifting focus: bad weather outside, fewer distractions, the motorbike in winter sleep, and suddenly, all the “someday” ideas get their turn.
Back in 2001, I got my hands on the first fractal traveler program written in C by Jindrich Novy. There is no mention of this guy on today’s web, but back then, he was my hero. The program was compact, elegant, and worked surprisingly well, allowing very deep zooms on a Celeron CPU running at 500 MHz. You can find it here.
Since then, I attempted to create a similar experience several times but never got far, mostly due to a lack of motivation to dive into the deeper math of perturbation theory required to make it work beyond naive implementations. And sometimes, dreams come true.
So…
Last year, to kick off my chaos theory series, I built the Synaptory Fractal Traveler, a browser-based, accelerated fractal explorer for zooming into the beauty of Mandelbrot/Julia sets. It came with a whole backlog1 of ideas on how to push it further.
This winter, I finally sat down and burned down enough for the next version.
The quality of my notes let me put Claude Code to work this time. I hoped it would help me with some of the math-heavy challenges, but it caused more damage than clarity there. Where it did help a lot was test generation and a big chunk of the front-end work that would otherwise have taken me ages.
The App
The app is still not where I want it long-term. It’s compute-heavy and will happily spin up every fan your machine has, but it can also generate an absurd amount of beauty.
So after ~a year of iteration, I’m releasing a deeper, faster, more colorful, more polished, responsive, browser-ready version of my fractal zoomer for exploration, learning, and pure visual pleasure of mathematical structures.
If you’re into math, chaos, complexity, visual art, or you just like poking at things you don’t fully understand (but that look amazing), take it for a spin. I also dedicated a lot of time to preselecting some of the intricate structures for you and inventing creative names for them.
Live App: fractal.brnka.com
Source, Wiki, Release Notes: github.com/rbrnka/fractal-traveler
My subscribers are the first to see the new version before I share it on social media!
Coming
On the roadmap for the next stretch of bad weather: Zeta-function experiments and strange attractors. I’ve actually already rendered the Riemann zeta function in this version of the app (including its analytic continuation), but it’s hidden behind a secret hotkey because it’s not ready yet. If you want to see it, DM me.
Don’t forget to check out the original article on chaos paired with the app:
Enjoy!
This release is dedicated to Jindrich Novy, the author of the original Fractal Traveler from the year 2000, who has inspired me for years to build my own!
“Backlog” is a term IT folks use for a poorly prioritized TODO list :)