Fractals: A Tribute

Mandelbrot first made his discoveries in the 1960s in answer to the question: How long is the coastline of Britain? He realised that the answer depended upon how closely you looked. If you were to measure the coastline using rods of different lengths laid end-to-end the answer would depend upon the length of the rods as the shorter rods would pick up more indentations. According to one colleague "You get this mysterious combination of variability and organisation that is mathematically describable".

His paradoxical findings were published in 1967 and were largely ignored by the mathematical community for at least two decades. Now however, his findings are used to model everything from movements in the stock market, to the likelihood of natural disasters, to the health of the human heartbeat and the formation of clouds. 

Cell phone companies also use antennae convoluted into fractal shapes to pick up different radio frequencies enabling Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities on the same phone. All of which makes you realise how interdependent technological advances are upon specialists in completely different fields!

Click to view Fractal Zoom (2 mins) or 3D Fractal Zoom (1 min) videos.