Physics 21 Reading List #1

Hello, and welcome to ph21! Let's get down to business. If you need a refresher on complex numbers, start by going to MathWorld, or if you'd like more details, to Dave Joyce's short course.

You are now ready to tackle the Mandelbrot set: a short presentation is again at MathWorld. There is a treasure trove of information on the internet, and you can search for your own. But I liked:

- Dave Joyce's pages on the Julia and Mandelbrot sets;

- the article by A. K. Dewdney in Scientific American ("Computer Recreations," August 1988), which drew an entire generation of computer hobbyists to the Mandelbrot set;

- Benoit Mandelbrot's biographical sketch;

- the very extensive Encyclopedia of the Mandelbrot Set, especially about what to expect while exploring;

- the Chaos hypertextbook.

A couple of more technical references that you may need today are about:

- Parsing command line arguments in C++;

- the Python module os, including popen().

If you need more help in getting started with C or C++, have a look at the books in the lab (which should not be taken out of the lab), and ask your TA for assistance and pointers.