The orig­i­nal Man­del­brot is an amaz­ing object that has cap­tured the public’s imag­i­na­tion for 30 years with its cas­cad­ing pat­terns and hyp­not­i­cally colour­ful detail. It’s known as a ‘frac­tal’ — a type of shape that yields (some­times elab­o­rate) detail for­ever, no mat­ter how far you ‘zoom’ into it (think of the trunk of a tree sprout­ing branches, which in turn split off into smaller branches, which them­selves yield twigs etc.).

It’s found by fol­low­ing a rel­a­tively sim­ple math for­mula. But in the end, it’s still only 2D and flat — there’s no depth, shad­ows, per­spec­tive, or light sourc­ing. What we have fea­tured in this arti­cle is a poten­tial 3D ver­sion of the same frac­tal.  Read more here