Jeffrey Stewart Ely

The spherical chandelier is composed of squarish lenses. Inside the chandelier is a cubical object that has been painted with the Mandelbrot set. Each of the lenses gives us a different view of this object. This interior object and the individual lenses are all variations of the quartic surface, x^4 + y^4 + z^4 = 1. The image was constructed using the ray tracing technique and required the solution of over a billion quartic equations, At^4 + Bt^3 + Ct^2 + Dt + E = 0, as the individual rays through each pixel were followed into this mathematical world of quartic surfaces. Snell's law was used to correctly model the refraction of the rays as they passed through the lenses. Finally, the background also shows a portion of the Mandelbrot set.