Ken Perlin
The noise the land is made from
American computer scientist who invented gradient noise in 1983 and simplex noise in 2001, the smooth randomness behind most generative textures and flow fields.
Topography
Equal-height lines trace an imagined landscape. A mountain, a crater or a long ridge is folded by smooth noise into islands of nested contours.
About this pattern
Contour mapping · seeded height fields
This is a synthetic height field, not geographic data. The underlying Gaussian mountain or ring-shaped caldera provides the structure; three scales of seeded noise wrinkle it. Each line follows a fixed elevation, with every fifth line a little heavier, as on a contour map.
Behind the mathematics