Mikkel Hartmann is a generative artist based in Denmark who codes visual work from the mathematics of chaos theory, including strange attractors and symmetric fractals. By profession he is a data scientist with a Ph.D. in experimental physics from Roskilde University and the Laboratoire Léon Brillouin near Paris, where he studied the structure and dynamics of hydrogen-bonded liquids.
His images of strange attractors and symmetric fractals draw on the book Symmetry in Chaos, which pairs the underlying mathematics with methods for generating the figures. He builds the work in Python, using Datashader for coloring and rendering and Numba to speed up the underlying calculations. This combination of data and visual pattern-making goes back to 2016, when he and his brother won a prize at the Hack our Art hackathon for Colors of Public Art, a project mapping the dominant colors of public artworks across Denmark.
