This is very interesting. In the past, I remember how fascinated I was with fractal geometry. Although I'm not sure how relevant this is, I thought this may be interesting and fun to add to this thread:
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
The link from rosettacode.org contains a collection of algorithms in various computer languages to generate and draw a Mandelbrot set. I'm checking out the Python code tonight, which recommend using matplotlib and Numpy libraries.