Talk:Nova fractal

initial discussion
Hey there wikipedia admins, I just made this page because I thought there was a bit of a gap when it comes to novaFractal on wikipedia.

It's a pretty cool fractal formula so I thought I'd add a bit of info and an example image.

I made the image myself and it's also available at my picasa web album, here.

The formula was invented by Paul Derbyshire, and the ultraFractal version was implemented by Damien M Jones.

It would be good to convert the formula to math-markup, but I'm not too familiar with that yet so I might need a bit of help. I'm happy to explain what the terms mean if anyone has a second to convert the formula for me :D

cheers, have a good one! :D Danwills (talk) 05:42, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

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Re: proposal for deletion
Well I think it's kindof sad that this article would be proposed for deletion, when you look at the size and immense detail in some of the articles about video games and that type of thing.

This is really a very small homage to a formula that is available in most of the fractal rendering applications that are out there. I think it is important to note the interesting ones, in fact there are already quite a few stub articles about other fractals that are far less well known than nova.

Nova is one of the standard formulae in UltraFractal.

I can see your concern, nova is not a very extensively academically researched formula, but it is very interesting in its aesthetic qualities and I would like to see this article stay around.

Some examples of existing fractal stub articles (or ones that don't google well) are:


 * Tricorn_%28mathematics%29
 * Gravity_set
 * Burning_Ship_fractal
 * Hofstadter%27s_butterfly

I have added a couple more links, and I will add the stub template too. I will also add some more images to illustrate the fractal better.

Danwills (talk) 01:10, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I still see nothing notable about this fractal. Links to blogs and YouTube are not reliable sources. Ultrafractal can produce millions of pretty images - we don't need a page on every one.
 * What is notable about this particular fractal ? What else can be said about this family of fractals ? Has there been any systematic exploration of its behaviour as the parameters relax and power are varied ? Can we even say what values of these parameters were used to create the image on the page ? Without this type of information, the page will always be a stub about a pretty but random image.
 * How about we merge this into the Newton fractal article (which already has a gallery where we could put this page's image) as an example of one possible generalisation of Newton fractals ? Gandalf61 (talk) 08:23, 20 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I see what you mean and I agree that more information about why this fractal is notable should be added.
 * I do believe that this fractal is notable in its own right, we could consider merging it with the newton fractal article, but I would rather keep it separate for now if possible. Nova contains some extremely sensitive behavior that has no parallel in the newton fractal (though I am told that it is caused by a known aspect of newtons root-finding method). I have discussed this on the ultraFractal mailing list a bit. It turns out that the Mandelbrot Fractal formula has some similarly sensitive behavior under certain settings. I hope to elucidate this somewhat in the Mandelbrot article at some stage.
 * I can certainly add some information about what parameters generate the type of behavior seen in the example image, and I will also add example images that show how the fractal changes under various settings of its parameters. (I have already rendered these, and will upload them as soon as I can.)
 * Danwills (talk) 05:15, 21 May 2008 (UTC)


 * 1 week later, still no reliable sources or other evidence of notability. If none appear in the next 24 hours I will nominate this page at AfD. Gandalf61 (talk) 08:57, 28 May 2008 (UTC)


 * I have now nominated this page at AfD - discussion here. Gandalf61 (talk) 12:07, 29 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Of the hundreds of fractals in UF this is by far the most significant one that mixes elements of the Mandelbrot set with Newtons fractal, there is a lot which is unique to it, many of the fractals in UF are just experiments with combinations of how to build formula and\or make them adjustable in different ways, Nova has a lot of things that can be done with it and only it making it stand out among other fractals. Also UF is not by far the only fractal software to feature it promenantly. Alan2here (talk) 16:45, 19 June 2008 (UTC)