Lindenmayer Systems, Fractals, and Plants

1. Front Matter

   Pages N2-2

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2. Introduction

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 3-9

3. Fractals

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 11-22

4. Models of plant architecture

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 23-54

5. Models of plant organs

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 55-62

6. Models of cell layers

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 63-68

7. Other applications of L-systems

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 69-80

8. A guide to the references

   • Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan

   Pages 81-85

9. Back Matter

   Pages 87-123

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1-systems are a mathematical formalism which was proposed by Aristid 1indenmayer in 1968 as a foundation for an axiomatic theory of develop­ ment. The notion promptly attracted the attention of computer scientists, who investigated 1-systems from the viewpoint of formal language theory. This theoretical line of research was pursued very actively in the seventies, resulting in over one thousand publications. A different research direction was taken in 1984 by Alvy Ray Smith, who proposed 1-systems as a tool for synthesizing realistic images of plants and pointed out the relationship between 1-systems and the concept of fractals introduced by Benoit Mandel­ brot. The work by Smith inspired our studies of the application of 1-systems to computer graphics. Originally, we were interested in two problems: • Can 1-systems be used as a realistic model of plant species found in nature? • Can 1-systems be applied to generate images of a wide class of fractals? It turned out that both questions had affirmative answers. Subsequently we found that 1-systems could be applied to other areas, such as the generation of tilings, reproduction of a geometric art form from East India, and synthesis of musical scores based on an interpretation of fractals. This book collects our results related to the graphical applications of- systems. It is a corrected version of the notes which we prepared for the ACM SIGGRAPH '88 course on fractals.

• computer graphics
• fractal
• Mathematica
• plants

• Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, Regina, Canada

  Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, James Hanan