

Brainfilling Curves - a Fractal Bestiary (online book) - ohwp
http://archive.org/stream/BrainfillingCurves-AFractalBestiary/BrainFilling

======
Smerity
This is a beautiful book -- thanks for pointing it out! It's a graphical and
mathematically light introduction to many of the areas in which fractals /
space-filling curves intersect with programming, even if it's not explicitly
pointed out.

For example, on their page covering Node-Replacement Curves[1], they mention
both Hilbert Curves and Z-Order Curves. They don't describe them heavily
there, but they're used in many spatial databases to allow for efficient
indexing of two or more dimensional data.

Google Maps[2] for example uses Hilbert Curves internally to allow for fast
querying of queries such as "shops within 5km of your house". They've also
open sourced numerous libraries that perform these calculations[3][4].

The book interface itself is also quite nice, though I still prefer the PDF
copy you can get by hitting the Information button (i) on the top right.

Edit: Wow. I thought that PDF was taking a while to load: the PDF is over
200MB. Maybe best to explore the book online!

[1]: [http://archive.org/stream/BrainfillingCurves-
AFractalBestiar...](http://archive.org/stream/BrainfillingCurves-
AFractalBestiary/BrainFilling#page/n27/mode/2up)

[2]: <http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol4/p290-venetis.pdf>

[3]: <https://code.google.com/p/s2-geometry-library/>

[4]: [http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/uzaygezen-m...](http://google-
opensource.blogspot.com.au/2008/08/uzaygezen-multi-dimensional-indexing.html)

~~~
keenerd
> Wow. I thought that PDF was taking a while to load: the PDF is over 200MB.

The Djvu file is 13MB. (To read these, I use DjView.)

[http://ia701203.us.archive.org/22/items/BrainfillingCurves-A...](http://ia701203.us.archive.org/22/items/BrainfillingCurves-
AFractalBestiary/BrainFilling.djvu)

~~~
tiziano88
I prefer the epub version now that Google play books supports side loading of
such files (kindle has been doing the same for a while already I think)

