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Salah Kouhen

Salah Kouhen

A PhD student at Oxford. Interested in turbulence, physics generally and a mix of many other things.

Game of life writer

Play This JavaScript app converts text into cells and plots them on a canvas. These cells then evolve according to the classic rules of the game of life. The game of life illustrates how complex behaviour can arise from simple rules, a key concept in chaos theory. In this case

Fractal portal VFX idea

Fractal portal VFX idea

A while ago I was watching Chris Danforth's lecture series on chaos. During one of the lectures he showed the Julia sets, which you can play around with here. I thought that moving along the negative real axis would make a really cool portal opening effect. I made

Julia set explorer

Julia set explorer

A few weeks ago I wrote a bit about how Mandelbrot zooms are created, check that out here. Today's article is about that fractal's relatives, the Julia sets. To refresh ourselves, the Mandelbrot set is generated by asking whether zero will explode or not when you

Lake from a dream: the Fresnel effect

Lake from a dream: the Fresnel effect

I made a lake in unity! You can scroll down to walk around it in your browser. The lake is achieved by combining a few different effects. Reflections, small waves on the surface (generated by layering noise at two scales that shifts in time), waves that emanate from the player

Fractals, Infinty and AI

Fractals, Infinty and AI

Have you ever watched one of those super deep fractal zoom videos? I saw this one in particular back in high school and remember being blown away; how was such beauty being constructed? I thought that there must be some complicated mathematics that was being used to generate the image

Von Kármán vortex street Lattice Boltzmann method sim

Von Kármán vortex street Lattice Boltzmann method sim

A von Kármán vortex street happens when fluid flows past a cylindrical obstruction. You get a series of vortices that march down flow. I wrote a Lattice-Boltzmann method solver in c# to simulate such a scenario. It suffers from numerical instability but if the velocity is raised slowly enough, you

What's been happening? (Part 2)

What's been happening? (Part 2)

This is the second of two posts in which I try to give a proper answer to "what's been happening?". I am attempting to give an overall picture of how things became the way they are. Part 1 was on prehistory and started with the big