I read this as a high school student and saw a presentation on mandelbrot set around the same time. The presenter showed this equation: z = z**2 + c and explained how complex numbers worked. I went home and thought really hard- harder than I had, clearly figuring out some stuff I didn't know before (like mapping a small floating point interval to the "high-res" screen of my apple //e. Eventually I got a working program and started it... and it didn't get very far before I had to go to bed. I didn't even know at the time whether you could leave a computer on overnight- would it overheat? But I did and woke up to... nothing. My BASIC program hadn't gotten to any of the set yet, just the bands around it. At that point, I decided I needed a faster computer and eventually upgraded to a 80286 DOS machine which I think was able to run FRACTINT. FRACTINT was a clever optimization that used integer (which was all my poor 286 could do) and a number of other tricks to speed up set rendering. It was a very useful lesson in how to optimize.

That book, and several others (K&R C, Hackers) helped expand my high school mind and point me in the direction of high performance computing, complex systems, and simulation. The butterfly effect played a huge role in my understand of classical causality.

Gleick's "Chaos" got me sent to the principal's office in high school. I went crazy for fractals. Unfortunately all I had at home was an IBM PC XT. Mandelbrot set renderings were agonizingly slow and the CGA palette was too limiting.

Around this time my co-conspirator and I realized the library had 386s that almost no one was using for catalog search. They became our fractal render farm. We'd exit the catalog program, insert a floppy with our latest renderer, kick off a deep zoom, and turn off the monitors to avoid suspicion until we could check back next period. The results were thrilling. What a difference the access to compute made.

You all know the story -- eventually the librarian found us out and reported us for "hacking."

This book changed my life. I was an awful mathematics student in high school, but having a very lukewarm interest in an artistic career I decided to take maths as an advanced subject so that I might pursue architecture or something. I ended up getting a U in my maths exams, which in the British grade system stands for “Unmarked”. I did so poorly that my paper wasn’t even worthy of a mark!

Around the same time, I was wandering around the I saw a book cover with the weirdest, most beautiful looking graphics I’d ever seen. I still remember thinking “What the hell is that supposed to be?” as I picked it up. The copy I held had a colored picture segment as the middle pages with crisper, more mindblowing images. I borrowed the book and started reading it, trying to figure out how those images were drawn.

Long story short, I ended up becoming quite competent at mathematics. Fractals (albeit statistical ones) actually ended up being an important topic in my doctoral research. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t seen those weird images - I’d certainly have become a very mediocre architect at best.

The fact that this is on Rudy Rucker’s github makes it doubly cool. Reading his book “Infinity and the Mind” is what got me to go back to school (as a math major). That book changed my life for the better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker

I read Chaos while I was in high school in 1987. I promptly fell into a rabbit hole, coding the Lorenz attractor on an Apple IIe at my school.

I was blown away that no matter where I zoomed in, there was more detail. Did humans create those features by inventing mathematics, or did they exist independently in the universe, waiting to be discovered? So many teenage philosophical conversations were prompted by that experience!

The program in Applesoft Basic was SLOW! It's too bad it didn't motivate me to learn 6502 assembly.