29 September 2026

On 19 September, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the first release of XaoS, a free fractal zoomer and morpher. The event was announced on Facebook, in the XaoS application, on the users' and developers' mailing lists, on the website of the Jírovcova 8 secondary school, on the website of The Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists, and on the Hungarian Unix Portal. The most official announcement can be found here.

We met at Gymnázium Jírovcova 8 in České Budějovice. It is Jan Hubička's alma mater. Back in 1996, he and Thomas Marsh, two young programmers with an interest in mathematics, started the XaoS project merely for fun. It turned out that they had pioneered an exciting project that inspired many others to contribute to it or to use the software in related projects.

About 15 participants attended in person (among them Jan), while between 5 and 10 people joined online (among them Thomas). They followed two contributed talks given by Jonathan Wolfe and me. After I summarized some highlights of the past 30 years, Jonathan gave examples of how the Fractal Foundation uses fractal software, including XaoS, in its educational work, teaching young learners about the beauty of fractals.

The organizers from Gymnázium Jírovcova 8, with the wonderful support of its deputy director Lenka Kudrličková and former teacher Roman Hašek, presented a special gift to Jan to commemorate the past years. Sandwiches, cookies and refreshments were provided with the support of the České Budějovice branch of The Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists.

Jonathan's trip was financially supported by the Private University of Education, Diocese Linz, and the Johannes Kepler University, Linz School of Education, Fachgruppe Mathematik Didaktik, Austria.

XaoS received remarkable support from Google this year when the project was selected as a mentored project for Google Summer of Code 2026. Improving XaoS was announced under the umbrella of the GNU Project. A student from India, Avinash Sharma, contributed to the project by developing a new platform targeting mobile devices. His contribution can already be tried out on Windows.

Avinash worked hard on the project for three months. We hope that his extensions will soon enable XaoS to become a social network software for fractals, a kind of Instafractal or FrakTok. At the moment, we use a temporary server at the Research Institute for Symbolic Computation that stores and serves the fractal images created and uploaded by the users.

As an unexpected revitalization of the codebase, Jan quickly presented a complete rewrite of the main XaoS algorithm in C++, using vibe coding. XaoS-Modern now compiles smoothly on a recent Linux box using CMake and Qt and displays the Mandelbrot Set in its classic XaoS look.