🚀 go-pugleaf

In 1990 Christopher Kane wrote (see 'FRACTAL' discussion list <FRAC-L@GITVM1>
Fri, 12 Jan 90 11:59:00 CST Subject: RE: Area of the M-Set; archive filename
is NOTEBOOK, 60% into file)

  "About two months ago, I send a query to the list regarding the area of the
Mandelbrot Set. Well, the answer seems to be 1.508 to four significant digits.
This is according to Dave Rabenhorst in The Journal of Chaos and Graphics,
vol. 2 August 1987.  He uses a brute-force approach to finding this result.
Basically, he took a typical Mandelbrot calculating/displaying program and
modified it to count the number of points that fall in the set and dividing
by the number of points in the square (-2,2)-(2,-2) that surrounds the set."

The University of California San Diego library doesn't seem to have 
The Journal of Chaos and Graphics.  Does this journal really exits? :-)
The value 1.508 is amazingly close to what we are now getting, especially
considering Rabenhorst apparently used 129x129 pixels!  Does anyone have
any earlier references to Mandelbrot Set area calculations?  The first
estimate could be from Dr. Mandelbrot's first ASCII printout of the set.

Jay 'Not tonight honey, I have a bifurcating fractal' Hill
-- 
{ hilljr@jupiter.saic.com } begin writeln(3*ln(640320)/sqrt(163):17:15) end.
void main(){double sqrt(), y=1/sqrt(2.), a=.5, m=1,z; int n=0;
for(;m*=2,z=sqrt(1-y*y),y=(1-z)/(1+z),a=a*(1+y)*(1+y)-m*y,n<3;n++);
printf("%17.15lf\n",1/a);}