Fractals

[browngirl]

Tigerlily and Wolf saved an episode of Nova for me, one about fractals, because they are good to me. I'm no mathematician; long ago, I ran up against a brick wall called Calculus. But I am fascinated by math, the language the universe seems to be written in (or at least the one we humans read it in) even though I don't understand so much of it.

I especially love fractals because there's something intuitive about them I almost comprehend. I was reading about math recently, and there's a lot that might as well be Sanskrit for all the good my reading did me, but fractals... I can see the general surface shape of the idea, if not down into its detailed structure. The complexity emerging from simple beginnings, the recursion and the self-similarity of how pieces look almost but not *exactly* like the whole, those all makes sense.

To say nothing of the visual aspect. It's not just that they're appealing; it's that they're... they're complex the way natural systems are complex, as the show pointed out. I remember noticing that resemblence back when I first read about fractals, in high school. I can't quantify it, nor am I yet a good enough writer to describe that resemblence except with similes. I can just see it. It fascinates me that fractals woven into computer programs can create realistic trees and clouds and mountains, and it all makes me look at squids and cats and my own hands and wonder what equations could model all these living things, if one day we'll be able to plug a string of symbols into a computer and produce a three-dimensionally graphed portrait of a particular person.

I admit, I feel a little like smart when I watch a popular science show and already know a lot of what they want to teach. I was calling out the names of the Koch Snowflake and the Cantor Set and so on. At any rate, this entry is a note to myself to read more about fractals --- there are probably a couple of sensible books for laypeople out there, at this point --- and to bake those Sierpinski Cookies already.

Comments

[gosling.livejournal.com]

Bake them for our party? *hopeful look*

*hugs*

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Fractals, and chaos theory, are among the coolest things I know about. (So much so that I wanted to own the domains strangeattractor.[com/org/net], but they were taken.) Besides, I love the word "self-similar"; it's the sort that's easy to visualize, but causes doubletakes when really used.

I think fractals are almost the defining characteristic of "natural"; there's very little in nature that fits Euclidean geometric definitions, but fractals describe the world without breaking a sweat.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

Ah - millefiori! :)

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I first encountered the mandelbrot set in the late 80's when one of the IT guys--well, they didn't call it IT then--when the nice computer guy at work was borrowing surplus computer cycles and using the company's computer-to-videotape gadget to generate a long zoom movie into the set, showing the endless detail.

Aside from the pretty pictures, I think it's amazing that the mathematics of the Mandlebrot set are so simple as to fit into the chorus of a song, yet contain infinite complexity. It really makes the connection between the relative simplicity of the laws of physics and the infinite complexity of the universe much more graspable.

[rickvs.livejournal.com]

I've been hooked on fractals for over twenty years -- I actually have a copy of Mandelbrot's "The Fractal Geometry of Nature" on my shelf, and remember typing in a BASIC-language program to generate the Mandelbrot set on my Atari 800. I had to leave it running all night to get a full-screen image. Those were the days *sniffle*

[cellio]

Fractals are cool. I've never studied the math, but they're cool to look at. :-)