March 6 - Fractals

Fractals were named by Benoit Mandelbrot. He's a mathematician who devised a way of mathematically explaining the tendency of many things in nature to follow irregular patterns.

Natural fractals include the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; and the clustering of galaxies. Fractals are found in human pursuits, such as music, painting, architecture, and stock market prices. The stock market fractals idea was used in the film "The Bank", starring David Wenham, where fractals were used to bankrupt a bank.

Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry: "Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." —Mandelbrot, in his introduction to The Fractal Geometry of Nature.

This is an example of fractal geometry, where each component of the pattern is exactly the same as the pattern as a whole.





When you add more components to the images you can get amazingly beautiful results.