Common questions
Quick answers about Mandala. The maths ones each link into the field guide, where the full story lives.
- What is Mandala?
- A free, browser-based Mandelbrot and escape-time fractal explorer with desktop-class deep zoom. It runs entirely in your browser — no install or account required — using a Rust core compiled to WebAssembly and spread across a pool of Web Workers.
- What is the Mandelbrot set?
- The set of complex numbers
cfor which the iterationz → z² + cstays bounded when started fromz = 0. Plotting which points escape, and how fast, draws its endlessly detailed boundary. Read the full chapter → - How deep can Mandala zoom?
- Effectively without limit. Precision rises automatically with depth:
f64to about1e-13, double-double (~31 digits) to about1e-27, and a perturbation engine beyond that — the active tier shows in the on-screen readout. How that works → - Which fractals does Mandala support?
- Eight families. Six are escape-time sets — Mandelbrot, Multibrot (z³), Tricorn, Burning Ship, Celtic and Phoenix — each in both the parameter and Julia planes. The other two are root-finding fractals coloured by which root of
z³ − 1an orbit converges to: Newton (single-plane) and Nova (a convergence-plus-escape hybrid whose parameter plane grows Mandelbrot-like minibrots). All come with 21 colour palettes plus a custom-gradient editor and animated colour cycling. The equations, family by family → - Is Mandala free, and does it need an app?
- It's free and needs no app or sign-up — just a modern browser with JavaScript and WebAssembly. The core runs entirely on your machine; the only things that ever use the network are optional and stay off until you choose them — opt-in analytics, syncing bookmarks through your own Google Drive, and (where enabled) publishing a view to the community gallery. If you want an app, Mandala is an installable PWA: your browser's "install app" option gives it its own window, and once visited the core keeps working offline.
- How do I share or save a view?
- Every view has a link that captures the exact spot and settings — including a running colour-cycle, which resumes for whoever opens it — you can bookmark views to revisit, and you can export the picture as a PNG or JPEG at the size you choose (or, at shallow zoom, a seamlessly looping WebM clip of one colour-cycle).
- Can I embed a Mandala view on my own website?
- Yes — pick Share → Copy embed code in the app for a paste-ready snippet: your share link marked
data-mandalaplus one script tag (mandala-embed.js). The link becomes a live, read-only mini-view of that exact spot — any zoom depth — with a badge that opens the full explorer. Embeds set no cookies and load no analytics on your page, and without JavaScript the link still works as a plain share link. - Do bookmarks sync across devices?
- By default they live only in your browser, but the Bookmarks dialog can make them durable two ways: download the whole list as a small JSON backup file and import it anywhere, or — entirely opt-in — sign in with Google to sync them through your own Google Drive (its hidden per-app storage; nothing touches a Mandala server, and nothing from Google loads until you click sign-in).
- Where can I learn the mathematics behind the pictures?
- The site carries a full mathematical field guide: nine chapters and a glossary, from what a fractal is through worked orbits, the colouring pipeline, Julia sets, distance estimation and the deep-zoom numerics — with proper typeset equations, and every figure rendered by Mandala itself and one click from the live view.
Something unanswered? The About page has the project's story, and the field guide goes as deep as you want to go.