Learning with Wikipedia

I decided I needed to re-learn (actually learn in some cases) some basic math stuff. So, since I do not have instant access to my old math notes from high school and university, I turned to Wikipedia for help. I started out with Mandelbrot set and just clicked around on links that I did not know.

Here is the summary of my time (obviously you can read it for yourself, if you desire).

• Benoit Mandelbrot- The MAN when it comes to fractals. He discovered the Mandelbrot Set.
• Self-Similarity- when an object's whole is similar to its parts.
• Mandelbrot Set- "a set of points in a complex plane, whose boundary is a fractal." And also we have it defined as "the Mandelbrot set can be defined as the set of complex c-values for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial x_n+1 = x_n² + c remains bounded."
• That's where it got REALLY complicated for me. So, I had to try to figure out what in the world all this meant.
• I started with complex quadratic polynomial. That required knowing what a quadratic polynomial was as well as a complex number.
• There are real numbers (your basic 1,5,7,34,67,90, to infinity), imaginary numbers (represented by the Greek letter iota and is the sqaure root of -1), and complex numbers (a mixture of real and imaginary numbers).
• Complex numbers can be written as x+iy. "On a Cartesian plane z=complex number and is defined by z=x+iy

By now I am bored and I'm sure you are bored reading all this. So, I am going to give all the technical mess a rest for awhile and concentrate on the visual aspect of all this, and how to run the software. As I go along, I am sure I 'll return to the technical now and again, but this activity of reporting on it, is quite frankly boring and who wants to read about it!