Below is an image inspired by the cover of Douglas Hofstadter's classic book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. Like many folks in computer science and mathematical fields, I found this book a true treasure.

The trip-let is explained in Hofstadter's book. I constructed it the weekend of September 12, 1998 using Persistence of Vision Raytracer on my home PC, a Dell Dimension XPS 200 Pro; the original 480x40 image render time was about 1 hr 17 minutes (mostly due to the complex lighting used to create the softer shadow effects.)

An updated version for POV-Ray 3.6, using radiosity and photons, with some additional details, renders in about 4 minutes at 1024x1024 on a more modern PC (HP Pavilion m9340f).

Click here to view a 1024x1024 version of the image.

Click the image to view the POV source.

David J. Biesack