The MandelbulbThe Mandelbrot set is a creature of the flat plane. For decades people asked what its 3D cousin looks like — and this is the best-known answer: bulbous, organic, covered in whorls and canyons. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom. The journey: 2D complex numbers have no 3D version, so instead we treat a point’s distance-from-centre and two angles as the “number”, and cube-and-then-some (raise to the 8th power) by multiplying the distance and multiplying the angles. Iterate z → z⁸+c and keep the points that don’t blow up. A distance estimate lets the shader sphere-trace the surface in real time.