The Pharaoh’s Breastplate Image

pharaoh's breastplate

[click on the picture to view a larger image]

Above is an image I produced for Benoit Mandelbrot of the Pharaoh’s Breastplate fractal, a limit set of a Kleinian group. I wrote a Maple program to generate the centers and radii of the 6734 circles that make up the image. The data was then converted by another Maple program of mine into a suitable format and read into the public domain ray tracing program, POV-RAY. The image has been published on the cover of the book Multifractals and 1/f Noise  (ISBN: 0-387-98539-5) by Benoit Mandelbrot, who helped me with the selection of the textures and the arrangement of the "stones". The first published image of the Pharaoh’s Breastplate fractal (to my knowledge) appears in Mandelbrot’s book The Fractal Geometry of Nature (ISBN: 0-7167-1186-9) in Plate 199.