Category: Fractals

Fractals were discovered/invented only a few decades ago as computers evolved to the point where they could reveal to us the infinite complexity of simple repetitive processes. Benoit Mandelbrot must have been astonished to see the first printouts of the shape that now bears his name. (Strangely he looked slightly like a Mandelbrot himself with big ears and bulbous head). He gave them the name fractals from the idea that a one dimensional line that is infinitely long within a finite space is not truely one dimensional but neither truly two dimensional – therefore he called them fractals for having one and a half dimensions of reality.