A Journey into the Unending World of Fractals FROM SATELLITE SOFTWARE ENGINEER TO ARTIST and teacher, Masonic Village at Elizabethtown resident Bill Decker has certainly lived a complex life. His long-time hobby of creating fractal artwork surely follows suit. Bill’s unique interest reaches as far back as his days as a student studying astronomy and physics at Penn State University.
These formulas always create the same shapes every time they are “solved,” so instead of saving each image that is created, the formula itself can be saved for later.
“There was a nice library [at Penn State], and they subscribed to 40 or 50 of the biggest scientific publications,” he said. “I started reading ‘Scientific American,’ and there was a story about fractals.”
“Because of the nature of fractal formulas, you can load them back into the program later,” Bill explained, “so you can return to the ones that you really like.”
In the 1980s, as personal computer technology became faster and more available, Bill’s interest in fractals and creating digital fractal art grew. He continued creating fractal artwork throughout the early 2000s, but then took a break until 2017, when he came across more free time in retirement and started teaching classes on it at Masonic Village.
Over his decades of creating, reworking and expanding upon his artwork, Bill kept those formulas organized. This means he can always find the ones he marked down as “good” and recolor and manipulate them even more to create more interesting artwork. By the time he “rebooted” his hobby in 2017, he had more than 1,500 formulas and images catalogued.
WHAT IS FRACTAL ART?
Besides having more time to focus on fractals, Bill feels blessed in numerous ways to be at Masonic Village.
At a basic level, fractals are a visual art form that use mathematical formulas to generate images of surprising 12
complexity and variety. They have patterns that can repeat infinitely and can be “zoomed in” indefinitely, showing the same pattern and shape forever.
Summer 2020 Issue
“I was introduced to Masonic Village by my brother. About a dozen years ago, I visited and thought it
