Thanks Vitaliy for gathering all this info. I didn't expect Wolfram Research to pay much attention to the page since I figured you guys see more examples of how powerful Mathematica can be than most people. I thought maybe I would see a message from WR saying "We do not approve of 'the sierpinski triangle page to end most sierpinski triangles pages ™' because it fails to itallicize 'Mathematica' on multiple occassions."

It's been interesting seeing the overall response to the page because the original impetus for it was practical: helping me get a job. (I'm still working on that actually. And on a related note, Amazon will probably notice I don't have any money in my bank account, so if anyone knows a good place to host a static website let me know. I'll probably try GitHub's hosting.) After I started the page though, the vision for it kept growing and I decided to forget about practical concerns in its case.

I built the page up fairly casually over the course of about 4 months. Most of it was straightforward but there were a couple things that took a disproportionate amount of time, in some cases because there was a lot to experiment with, like with 3D cellular automata, and in others because I was obsessively iterating on the UI, like with the 3D matrix replacement program.


This was surprising to me when I first made my blog. Having words link to specific slides is a pretty obvious mechanic, yet I hadn't seen it anywhere. In fact you can make a variety of simple-yet-powerful composable switching things in HTML/JS not unlike Mathematica's basic UI controls that can be useful for all sorts of things. It's possible that people have had trouble implementing these kinds of ideas because they are clunky to do without using closures in Javascript. I think a nice Mathematica project would be something that converts Mathematica TabViews and special links into that linked form when exporting to HTML.

More than a few aspects of the page were due to serendipity. If Mathematica didn't have the cow/shuttle, I probably wouldn't have mentioned the Riemann sphere since it would have been too boring to describe. Then when I tried to color the cow black and white, I had the intuition to use a factor in the VertexTextureCoordinates (which I didn't really understand at the time) that happened to give that awesome appearance to the cow, which I assume is a consequence of the particular ordering of the vertices.

My favorite image on the page is #9 here, which I found by trying a particular angle where things happen to align in the image. It was almost an accident, but I don't think it would be fair to call any of these things accidents because Mathematica makes it really easy to experiment and iterate and follow your nose, etc. One of the things I've been surprised by is how uncommon Mathematica seems to be, for example, in data analysis. The various reasons for that are understandable, but still, don't those people realize what they're missing??? So it was my hope that the page's take-away message for technical people would be "you should probably be using Mathematica."

Something important here is that the page was only possible because of the Home Edition. It's interesting that people assume I'm a mathematician, but I'm just a random college dropout (I didn't even major in math). The regular license would have never been in my vicinity and even the Home Edition cost me a lot.

In any case, if anyone happens to have any questions I'll try to answer. One thing I can explain is that on a personal level, the page is basically me just screwing around. On its own it doesn't really have a purpose other than amusing me, which hopefully explains its irreverent meander.

I'm 1/2 way through hoping he'll find a Sierpinski triangle in a financial data set to excuse me reading this in meeting prep time, but somehow I don't think I'm in charge.

@Vitaliy, you have great taste of visual design, too.