Wolfram Fractals Reference App Reviews

Average

Bill Smyth

I can enter the real and imaginary coordinates and see the point within (or without) the Mandelbrot set. But I cannot move around in the set to look at other points.

I love these course assistants by Wolfram. They are all well designed and solid nuggets of computation. I only resent that they have apparently been abandoned. I get the message that they will slow my device because they have not been updated in three years. Please make them compatible with the most recent iOS version and technology!

Fractals are an Incredible Adventure

GigaPan

Wolfram's Fractals are immensely interesting ... something akin to the symbolism of Lewis Carrol's masterpiece, Alice's Adventure in Wonderland; the app is a continual adventure of delightful discovery.

A Missed Opportunity

wgreenberg

Being a longtime admirer of the absolute beauty of fractals, as well as a huge fan of Wolphram Research's revolutionary products, I'm truly amazed at the unrealized potential in this app. It is essentially just a static list of fractal-related queries for Wolfram|Alpha, and as such if your phone has a browser and/or the standalone Alpha app, you already have more than what this app provides! I expected at least a bit of local documentation on fractals, or even each fractal's MathWorld page placed alongside the Alpha result, but instead all one is given is the exact same page you might get if you query "cantor set 10 iterations". Also, it's understandable that Alpha can't be accessed while a phone is offline, but really, no offline functionality for the app at all? Very disappointing.

Nothing more than suggested queries for Wolfram Alpha

sblom

I naively expected this to be more like an interactive CDF notebook and less like a thematic bundle of Wolfram Alpha example queries. I guess I should have been able to infer from the description text where it says that it requires an Internet connection, but It didn't seem obvious to me at the time. Between (hopefully coming real soon) CDF on the iPad and opportunistic augmentation from Wolfram Alpha, Wolfram has all the pieces to make for a phenomenal interactive exploration of fractals or almost any other mathematical or scientific subject. But selling barely dressed up Wolfram Alpha sample queries makes the Alpha team look too desperate to monetize on their own while missing the even more fantastic big picture possibilities here.

Good reference to fractal types

jid555

The app is good for seeing different types of fractals, and you can view the fractals at specific iterations that you select. It would be very nice to be able to step through the iterations, but you need to go back to the drop down to select the next iteration to view. Some section on the math behind fractals would be nice also.

Good fractal reference app

ShibaBoy

Pros: Lots of fractals, good organization, Has some 3D fractals, 10+ iterations on some fractals. Cons: Could use retina display on fractal, Zooming in on the fractal and full screen view would also be nice.