Paul W. Carlson
Paul Carlson has been programming computers since 1979, and has been professionally employed in them since 1984. He wrote his first fractal-generating program in 1985, and has written about a dozen of them since. Of these, only the program called "Mind-Boggling Fractals" was for a general audience, the others being private code for private use.
In the year 1995, Mr. Carlson discovered a general method of rendering fractals that produce images with sharply defined elements and having a rounded, three-dimensional appearance. He began posting some of these images that year to the newsgroup alt . binaries . pictures . fractals, and was soon offered free webspace for fractal galleries at universities in France, the United States, and Canada. This public exposure led to several hundred (perhaps over a thousand) email messages about his images. Requests came as well that they be published in books. All such requests were granted, and so his fractals now appear in seven books in as many different languages.
At the request of others, Mr. Carlson wrote two articles for Computers & Graphics, one printed in 1996 and the other in 1999. These articles may be accessed through the museum's Links page.
In the 1980s and into the 1990s, Mr. Carlson maintained his own website wherefrom he displayed much of his work and sold his program Mind Boggling Fractals. This is the program with which he generated the images currently on display at this museum. Unable to maintain his site, he let it go dark in 1994. At that time, Clint Sprott, Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, maintained an archive of much of Mr. Carlson's work.
This museum opened in the year 2006, using as source material the archive of Clint Sprott and the remnants of Mr. Carlson's original site that were somewhat miraculously saved from destruction by www.archive.org.
Mr. Carlson currently lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado.