This seems kind of cool, but also feels a little hackish. There are two pieces they are 'gluing together': > “The Julia set is the base, like the southern hemi

This seems kind of cool, but also feels a little hackish. There are two pieces they are 'gluing together': > “The Julia set is the base, like the southern hemisphere, and the cap is like the top half,” DeMarco said. “If you glue them together you get a shape that’s polyhedral.” And the cap comes from: > To get the second, DeMarco and Lindsey wrote an algorithm. That algorithm analyzes features of the original polynomial, like its degree (the highest number that appears as an exponent) and its coefficients, and outputs another fractal shape that DeMarco and Lindsey call the “planar cap.” It may just be that the article doesn't present this aspect clearly enough—but from the description given, it just makes me wonder: why would it be interesting to glue these two pieces together? I suppose if their geometry is perfectly complementary so that all the complex fractal whorls fit together like puzzle pieces, then that's pretty interesting and surprising, and a key point—but the article doesn't touch on it! Also, (again, from the description given by the article), these '3-D fractals' arrived at by folding and gluing together planar fractals, seem fundamentally less interesting than the other 3D fractals which are more deserving of the name, IMO (e.g. the Mandelbulb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbulb). Then again, they're probably more interested in discovering deep properties about polynomials than making pretty things, unlike myself, so... go them.