Originally Posted by Jeremiah Noll
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At the beginning of this course I was much more certain of things! I have learned quite a bit, but with this learning came new mysteries. Studying chaos has expanded my mind and taught me things I never would have dreamed. When you sit and think about the concept and the principles which founded chaos it just makes sense. Butterflies can start El Niño's and the stock market is predictable to a small degree. But sensitive dependence on initial conditions is not the only principle of chaos, there is also the fact that extremely simple rules can produce infinitely complex results. Who would have thought a couple lines of computer code could produce the Serpinsky Triangle or model the population growth of a small nation. But the coolest things I have ever seen are fractals. Through this course I have developed a great understanding of the image, mapping, and product of fractal code. Simple functions and an imaginary plane can model infinity in the most accurate and beautiful way. I enjoyed fractals so much I decided to make them my semester project. The value of this course is a tremendous amount of insight into how the world works and how things thought to be random can really be very simple. I feel as if I have been shown a piece of how God put this universe together and how he made it so complex in only six days. Like deciphering the human genome code chaos makes us more able to predict, heal, and understand the way things work and why events happen.
I still use fractal software today and it is still interesting and novel even though I have been exposed to it for some time. I still have my own fractals on my website so that I can, hopefully, get others interested in math and science too. My friends never thought Math could be so intriguing. Since the Fall semester I have progressed in the ability to create lifelike landscapes from fractal software.