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I see that Benoit Mandelbrot, who coined the term fractal geometry, turns eighty next week.
I was lucky enough to be part of the group at R/Greenberg Associates in New York that helped bring one of Mandelbrot's and Dr. Richard Voss's famous fractal terrains to popular attention by animating a fly-through of it in a 1987 IBM television commercial.
We didn't have a sky, but to keep everything 'fractal,' we interpreted the terrain height field mesh as an image of blue and white color values.
The commercial was popular, and went on to win a number of awards, including a Gold Plaque, Computer Graphics, Chicago International Film Festival; a Gold Award, International Film & TV Festival; a Certificate of Merit, Institutional/Corporate ID, Chicago International Film Festival; and a Gold Award, Computer Graphics, Houston International Film Festival.
Happy Birthday Dr. Mandelbrot.
UPDATE 4/27/2009
Jonathon Coulton sings a nice song about the Mandelbrot Set. My daughter particularly enjoys this fractal zoom set to his music.
UPDATE 7/29/2009
I just came across this - Vol Libre by (Pixar's Chief Scientist) Loren Carpenter, who describes his work as follows:
"I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world's first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780 at about 20-40 minutes each."
very cool.
UPDATE 11/13/2009
3D Mandelbub: Some very interesting lit and shaded 3D versions

Awesome stuff!!
I remeber seing those images, and having no clue about how they could be created.
I only enterd the digital world in...1998.
Its with minds like yours that art and technology evolves!Kudos and keep on...
Thank you, but I want to emphasize, we didn't invent the images, we made them move. The ideas are Benoit Mandelbrots, and the implementation was Richard Voss's.
Nicely done! I love that high-res magazine clipping!