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"The interest of numeric is to open new fields of experimentation.
The images obtained by the visualisation of the results of numerical experiments will permit to present the results, not any longer as a series of numbers, but in a global way, in the form of curves or tasks. The idea of making faculties of eye recognition be the main help tool for the analysis of data or calculations results seems to be natural. The human spirit that uses a process of mental pictures needs "external pictures" to be stimulated, confronted with new problems, led on the way to new discoveries and solutions.
These digital images are more than simple intermediaries betrween the researcher and his pattern: stimulating the associative functions of the brain, they even may become the vehicles for new discoveries. These shapes that appear to the observer's eye, and translate an underlying order contained in an implicite way in equations sometimes reveal an unexpected phenomenon or give directions to tackle an open problem. (...)
Then this is a real exploration realized on these images and that can lead to some visual discoveries made from shapes, sometimes new or even unimaginable. An equally important fact, these images enable us to see and to observe what until then no optical instrument had shown us. By means of computer, different scientific fields among the most unattainable and the most abstract, specially some branches of mathematics and theoretical physics, today get a new experimental nature. One century ago Heinrich Hertz already pointed out that: "We cant escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an existence on their own, that they are more learned than those who discovered them, that we can extract more science than what originally has been put inside."

JEAN-FRANCOIS COLONNA : "The numerical computer experimentation" 
"La Recherche"-april 1987