Ed Algra, born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1930, now living near Rotterdam.  My education was a technical one, I came by accident to artistry, although I always had much interest in art, photography and music. 
I’m a retired chemical engineer, worked at a research institute on mechanical properties of plastics and composite materials.  I heard of fractals for the first time in the late eighties, and then read the well known books of Prof. Hans Lauwerier and other authors on this subject.  At that time I also attended a Fractal symposium at the Technical University Delft, where Benoît Mandelbrot and some other prominent authors revealed the secrets of this new mathematical world.  The pictures they showed made an overwhelming impression.  Years after that, after my retirement and the connection to the web in 2005, I discovered what had happened in the meantime, the birth of a new kind of art, based on fractal concepts.  Then it became a creative hobby for me. Both the mathematical and the artistic side of it have my interest.   Especially Ultra Fractal offers the possibility to write your own fractal math codes, and I love it to do so.  I started Renderosity uploading on instigation of Arend Nijdam, aka “Fractelaar” in September 2005.