Apollonian Gasket

Click and drag the red point to adjust the Apollonian Gasket.

This pleasant fractal is formed recursively as follows:

1. Take three mutually tangent circles and form their inner Soddy circle.
2. Repeat the previous step for the inner Soddy circle paired with each of the original three.

Written using the D3 visualisation library. Inspired by a demo of JSXGraph.

Requires a SVG-capable browser e.g. Mozilla Firefox or WebKit (Google Chrome, Safari &c.) — anything but Internet Explorer!

See Also

• Apollonian Gasket on cut-the-knot.org.
• Apollonian Gasket on Wolfram Mathworld.
• Apollonian Gasket on Wikipedia.

© Jason Davies 2012.