The last fifteen years have seen an enormous fascination for fractals develop among many people across society. One interesting phenomenon that has evolved over this time is the fantastic program FRACTINT that has been the results of the collaboration of literally hundreds of programmers. FRACTINT was designed to display fractals of many different kinds very quickly and very accurately on IBM PC's. Despite its less than purebred heritage, it is now of great use in thinking about fractal geometry and dynamical systems. In this course, we shall often turn to it to illustrate various points.
The documentation for FRACTINT is now available on the WWW. We begin our discussion of how FRACTINT works by giving pointers to these resources.
In addition, we have written a very short guide to the basics of FRACTINT, found here. Detailed help information is available within FRACTINT by pushing the F1 button. Several Unix-X11 versions of FRACTINT exist, including xmfract and xfractint.