A fractal is a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at

every scale. If the replication is exactly the same at every scale, it is called a self-similar pattern. An
example of this is the Menger Sponge. Fractals can also be nearly the same at different levels. Fractals
also includes the idea of a detailed pattern that repeats itself.

Fractal Geometry is based on the idea of scale invariance which means that a figure is the same, or is
invariant, no matter on what scale it is observed. In other words, the figure is constructed by repeating
the same pattern at smaller and smaller scales. The fern is certainly one of the best examples for
understanding this idea: a small part of the figure when enlarged reproduces the original figure (or if you
will, the part contains the whole). An object which possesses this property is called a fractal. From a
mathematical point of view, the repetition of patterns at smaller and smaller scales can be continued to
infinity. In the real word, nevertheless, the repetition stops after a certain number of jumps.

A fractal construction is extremely interesting for reasons of effectiveness. For example, if one wants to
insert the largest sheet possible in the smallest possible volume, by folding it up in such a way that its
faces never touch, one must give it a fractal shape. In addition, the instructions for such a folding are
very simple (and can be written in very few words) since it suffices to state that the same folding pattern
is repeated many times in succession. This is surely why one finds many fractal objects in nature: the
instructions for their growth can be encoded in very little space in DNA.

This auto-repetition of the same structure can also be applied to phenomena which vary in time. For
example, the fluctuations of the stock market possess a statistical fractal structure, that is to say, the
fluctuations over a year are similar on the average to those over a month, or to those over a day, or even
to those over an hour. To put it another way, if one "enlarges" the fluctuations over one day, one obtains
fluctuations which could very well be those over a year. Note, however, this is not always true.

Let's take for example the saw : if one selects a small portion of the blade of the saw (a tooth) and then
enlarge it, one does not obtain a new saw at all but only a very big tooth! In other words, on theblade of
a saw, there are not teeth on teeth on teeth, etc.

Even if in certain cases the scale invariance is only statistical (stock market fluctuations, coastlines,
clouds), it is nevertheless rigorously defined with what is called the fractal dimension, which measures in
a way the degree of "roughness" of the fluctuations or of the boundaries of the object.

For further discussion, go to the Fractals section in the Sculpture Maths section.
REFERENCE:

Michael Barnsley, Fractals Everywhere, Academi

Any mathematical concept now well-known to school children has gone through decades, if not
centuries of refinement. A typical student will, at various points in her mathematical career -- however
long or brief that may be -- encounter the concepts of dimension, complex numbers, and "geometry". If
the field of mathematics does not particularly interest her, this student might see these concepts as
distinct and unrelated and, in particular, she might make the mistake of thinking that the Euclidean
geometry taught to her in school encompasses the whole of the field of geometry. However, if she were
to pursue mathematics at the university level, she might discover an exciting and relatively new field of
study that links the aforementioned ideas in addition to many others: fractal geometry.

While the lion's share of the credit for the development of fractal geometry goes to Benoît Mandelbrot,
many other mathematicians in the century preceding him had laid the foundations for his work.
Moreover, Mandelbrot owes a great deal of his advancements to his ability to use computer technology
-- an advantage that his predecessors distinctly lacked; however, this in no way detracts from his
visionary achievements. Nevertheless, while acknowledging and understanding the accomplishments of
Mandelbrot, it undoubtedly helps to have some familiarity with the relevant works of Karl Weierstrass,
Georg Cantor, Felix Hausdorff, Gaston Julia, Pierre Fatou and Paul Lévy -- not only to make Mandelbrot's
work clearer -- but to see its connections to other branches of mathematics. Equally, while most authors
will not fail to include at least brief discussion of Mandelbrot's rather interesting and slightly
unconventional (for a modern mathematician) life in their texts on fractals, it seems only fair to give
some, if not equal, consideration to his predecessors.

Until the 19th century, mathematics had concerned itself only with functions that produced
differentiable curves. Indeed, the conventional wisdom of the day said that any function with an analytic
formula (i.e. sum of a convergent power series) would certainly produce such a curve. [3] However, on
July 18, 1872, Karl Weierstrass presented a paper at the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences showing
that for a a positive integer and 0 < b < 1

bncos(anx π)

is not differentiable. Using the limit definition of a derivative, he showed that the difference quotient of
the function

[f (x + h) - f (x)]/h

gets arbitrarily large as the index of summation increases.

As Weierstrass himself pointed out, Riemann had introduced

sin(n2x)/n2

as an example of a non-differentiable analytic function, but never published a proof, nor could anyone
replicate it. [14] Thus, Weierstrass's proof stands as the first rigorously proven example of a function that
is analytic, but not differentiable. While Weierstrass, and indeed, much of the mathematical
establishment of the time eschewed the use of graphs in favour of symbolic manipulation in order to
prove results, future mathematicians such as Helge von Koch and Mandelbrot himself found it useful to
represent their results graphically. [5] [7] Indeed, when one has only worked with curves that are
differentiable almost everywhere, an obvious question when one encounters a formula for a curve that
is not is, "what does it look like?"

While these are both approximations, one can see that these functions lack the smoothness of parabolas
or of the sine and cosine functions. These functions resisted traditional analysis and were -- though not
due to their appearance, which was beyond the ability of mathematicians of the day to represent --
labelled "monsters" by Charles Hermite and were largely ignored by the contemporary mathematical
community. [2]

In 1883 Georg Cantor, who attended lectures by Weierstrass during his time as a student at the
University of Berlin [9] and who is to set theory what Mandelbrot is to fractal geometry, [3] introduced a
new function, ψ , for which ψ' = 0 except on the set of points, {z}. This set, {z}, is what became known as
the Cantor set.

The function ψ is singular, monotone, non-constant and ψ' = 0 almost everywhere. It also has the
property that

ψ(1) - ψ(0) = 1 however ψ' (x) dx = 0 [3]

The Cantor set has a Lebesgue measure of zero; however, it is also uncountably infinite. [3] What is
more, it has the property of being self-similar, meaning that if one magnifies a section of the set, one
obtains the whole set again. Looking at Figure 4, one can easily see that each horizontal line is one third
the size of the horizontal line directly above it. In fact, self-similarity is a feature of fractals, and the
Cantor set is an early example of a fractal, though self-similarity was not defined until 1905 (by Cesàro,
who was analysing the paper by Helge von Koch discussed below) and fractals were not defined until
Mandelbrot in 1975, [2] thus Cantor would not have thought of it in those terms.
In a paper published in 1904, Swedish mathematician Helge von Koch constructed using geometrical
means the now-famous von Koch curve and hence the Koch snowflake, which is three von Koch curves
joined together. In the introduction to his paper he stated the following about Weierstrass's 1872 essay
[6]:

... it seems to me that his [Weierstrass's] example is not satisfactory from the geometrical point of view
since the function is defined by an analytic expression that hides the geometrical nature of the
corresponding curve and so from this point of view one does not see why the curve has no tangent.
Rather it seems that the appearance is actually in contradiction with the factual reality established by
Weierstrass in a purely analytic way.

Von Koch's curve, like the Cantor set, has the property of self-similarity. It, too, is a fractal, though, like
Cantor, von Koch was not thinking in such terms. He merely aimed to provide an alternative way of
proving that functions that were non-differentiable (i.e. functions that "have no tangents" in geometric
parlance) could exist -- a way that involved using "elementary geometry" (reference [6]'s title translates
to On a Continuous Curve without Tangent Constructible from Elementary Geometry). In doing so, von
Koch expressed a link between these non-differentiable "monsters" of analysis and geometry.

Von Koch himself was a fairly unremarkable mathematician. Many of his other results were derived from
those of Henri Poincaré, from whom he knew it was possible to obtain "pathological" results -- i.e. these
so-called "monsters" -- but never really explored them, outside of the aforementioned essay. [5]
Poincaré, it should be noted, studied non-linear dynamics in the later 19th century, which eventually led
to chaos theory, [2] a field closely related to fractal geometry, though beyond the scope of this paper. It
is therefore fitting that a mathematician whose work followed that of Poincaré so closely would turn out
to be one of the forefathers of a field that is closely related to the area of study for which Poincaré
himself helped lay the foundations.

An absolutely key concept in the study of fractals, aside from the aforementioned self-similarity and non-
differentiability, is that of Hausdorff dimension, a concept introduced by Felix Hausdorff in March of
1918. Hausdorff's results from the same paper were important to the field of topology, as well; [3]
however that his definition of dimension extended the previous definition to allow for sets to have a
dimension that is an arbitrary, non-zero value [4] (unlike topological dimension) ended up being integral
to the definition of a fractal, as Mandelbrot defined fractals "a set having Hausdorff dimension strictly
greater than its topological dimension." [2]

As soon as Hausdorff introduced this new, expanded definition of dimension, it was the subject of
investigation -- in particular by Abraham Samilovitch Besicovitch, who, from 1934 to early 1937 wrote no
less than three papers referencing Hausdorff's work. [3] Sadly, by this time, Hausdorff was experiencing
difficulties living as a Jew in Nazi Germany. He was forced to give up his post as a professor at the
University of Bonn in 1935, and even though he continued to work on set theory and topology, his work
could only be published outside of Germany. Despite temporarily managing to avoid being sent to a
concentration camp, the situation in Germany quickly became unbearable and, with nowhere else to go,
he, along with his wife and sister-in-law, opted to commit suicide in January 1942. [4]

The Hausdorff dimension, d, of a self-similar set -- its connection to fractal geometry, though, as
previously stated, there are many other applications of Hausdorff dimension -- which is scaled down by
ratios r1 , r2 , ... , rN (i.e. the first iteration of the set is the whole set, scaled down by a factor of r1)
satisfies the following two equations [2]:

r1d + r2d + ... + rNd = 1 and Nrd =1.

These equations, however, do not appear in Hausdorff's paper, as they relate directly to fractals (and
calculating the dimension of a fractal), which were ideas that would have been unknown to Hausdorff.
Still, from these two equations, it is easy to see how one can obtain a dimension that is not a whole
number, as [2]

d = log(N) / log(log(1/r).

At nearly the same time that Hausdorff did his research, two French mathematicians, Gaston Julia and
Pierre Fatou, developed results (though not together) that ended up being important to fractal
geometry. They studied mappings of the complex plane and iterative functions. Their work with iterative
functions led to the ideas of attractors, points in space which attract other points to them; and repellors,
points in space that repel other points, usually to another attractor. These concepts are also important to
chaos theory. The boundaries of the various basins of attraction turned out to be very complicated and
are known today as Julia sets, [7] an example of which can be seen in Figure 6. A more analytic definition
of a Julia set for a function, f (z), is [2]

J (f ) = ∂ {z | f (n)(z) → ∞ as n → ∞ }.

Namely, "the Julia set of f is the boundary of the set of points z ∈ C that escape to infinity under
repeated iteration by f (z)." [2]

Because Fatou and Julia (and, by extension, their work) predated computers, they were unable to
generate pictures such as the one on the right, which is the graph of millions of iterations of a function.
They were limited to what they could do by hand, which would only be about three or four iterations. [7]
Julia published a 199-page paper in 1918 called Mémoire sur l'iteration des fonctions rationelles, which
discussed much of his work on iterative functions and describing the Julia set. With this paper, Julia won
the Grand Prix of the Académie des Sciences and became extremely famous in mathematical circles
throughout the 1920s. However, despite this prominence, his work on iteration fell into obscurity for
about fifty years. [11]
Fatou, on the other hand, did not achieve the same level of fame as Julia, even contemporarily, despite
discovering very similar results -- though in a different manner -- and also submitting them to be
published. He submitted an announcement of his results to Comptes Rendus, while Julia had chosen to
send his opus to the Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées. Julia, protective of his work, sent
letters to Comptes Rendus asking them to investigate whose results had priority. The publication duly
launched an investigation and included a note on Julia's findings in the same issue as the Fatou's
announcement. This apparently discouraged Fatou enough to keep him from entering for the Grand Prix.
Still, the Académie des Sciences gave him some recognition and awarded him a prize for his paper on the
topic. [10]

Julia sets can be completely disconnected, in which case they are "dust" (Figure 7) -- similar to the
Cantor set (Figure 4) -- or they are completely connected (Figure 6). On rare occasions, they can be
"dendrites" (Figure 8), where they are "made up completely of continuously sub-branching lines, which
are only just connected since the removal of any point from them would split them in two," [7] at which
point, they would be considered "dust". [7]

The method for deciding whether or not a set is connected is to calculate out the orbit of the starting
point. The orbit for a starting point, x0 , is the sequence [2]

(x0 , x1 , x2 , ... ) where for each i ∈ N we have xi = f (xi-1).

If this sequence goes off to infinity, then the set is disconnected. Otherwise, it is connected. [7]

In 1938, the year after Besicovitch's last paper on Hausdorff dimension, Paul Lévy produced a
comprehensive treatment on the property of self-similarity. He showed that the von Koch curve was just
one of many examples of a self-similar curve, though von Koch himself had stated that his curve could be
generalized. The curves generated by Lévy (see Figure 9 for an example -- the green and blue sets are
two smaller copies of the larger set) were iterative and connected and, with enough iterations, covers (or
tiles) the plane. Lévy's curves, however, are not fractals, as they have both a Hausdorff and a topological
dimension of two. [3]

Little did anyone at this time suspect that there was someone, albeit still a very young person, who
would unite the works of Lévy and Hausdorff. Benoit Mandelbrot was born in 1924 in Warsaw, Poland
and, like Hausdorff, he was also Jewish, though his family managed to escape life under the Third Reich
in 1936 by leaving Poland for France, where family and friends helped them set up their new lives. One
of Mandelbrot's uncles, Szolem Mandelbrojt, was a pure mathematician, who took an interest in the
young Mandelbrot and tried to steer him towards mathematics. In fact, in 1945, Mandelbrojt showed his
nephew the works of Fatou and Julia, though the young Mandelbrot initially did not take much of an
interest. [13]

Mandelbrot's education was very uneven, and completely interrupted in 1940, when Mandelbrot and his
family were forced to flee the Nazis again. This time they went to central France. Mandelbrot, like Helge
von Koch before him, preferred visual representations of mathematical problems, as opposed to the
symbolic, [7] though this may also stem from his lack of formal education, due to World War II. [13]
Unfortunately, this would bring him into direct conflict with the teaching style of "Bourbaki", a group of
mathematicians whose belief in solving problems analytically (as opposed to visually) dominated the
teaching of mathematics in France at the time. [7]

After the war had ended, Mandelbrot took the entrance exams for the École Polytechnique in Paris,
despite having no preparation. He did very well in the mathematics section, where he could employ his
ability to solve problems through visualisation to answer questions. While this method was not always
possible on other sections, he managed to pass [7] and after a one-day career at the École Normale,
Mandelbrot started at the École Polytechnique, where he met another of his mentors, Paul Lévy, [13]
who was a professor at there from 1920 until his retirement in 1959 [12].

After completing his studies, Mandelbrot moved to New York, where he started work for IBM's Thomas J.
Watson Research Centre. The company gave him a free hand in choosing a topic of study, which allowed
him to explore and develop concepts using his own methods, without having to worry about the reaction
of the academic community. In 1967, while still there, Mandelbrot wrote his landmark essay, How Long
Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension [8], in which he linked the idea
of previous mathematicians to the real world -- namely coastlines, which he claimed were "statistically
self-similar". He argued that [8]

Self-similarity methods are a potent tool in the study of chance phenomena, including geostatics, as well
as economics and physics. In fact, many noises have dimensions D contained between 0 and 1 ...

After this essay and with the aid of computers, Mandelbrot returned to the work of Julia and Fatou. With
the ability to see, for the first time, what these sets looked like in their limits, Mandelbrot came up with
the idea of mapping the values of c ∈ C for which the Julia set for the function fc (z) = z2 + c is
connected. This creates the Mandelbrot set, M (Figure 10), which is more formally denoted as

M = {c ∈ C | fc(n)(z) is finite as n → ∞}

The Mandelbrot set is, for many, the quintessential fractal. When one zooms in on some part of the
edge, one notices that the Mandelbrot set is, indeed, self-similar. Furthermore, if one zooms in even
further on various sections of the edge, one obtains different Julia sets. In fact, it is "asymptotically
similar to Julia sets near any point on its boundary," as proved in a theorem by the Chinese
mathematician Tan Lei. [7]

Mandelbrot has managed not only to invent the discipline of fractal geometry, but has also popularized it
through its applications to other areas of science. He clearly believed this was important, as he once
stated [3]

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled
disciplines.

As he hinted in How Long Is the Coast of Britain? fractal geometry comes in useful in representing
natural phenomena; things such as coastlines, the silhouette of a tree, or the shape of snowflakes --
things are not easily represented using traditional Euclidean geometry. After all, no organic entity comes
to mind when one contemplates a square or a circle. Equally, no simple shape from Euclidean geometry
comes to mind when contemplating things such as the path of a river. Even the earth is not a perfect
sphere, however convenient it may be for one's calculations to treat it as such. Furthermore, fractal
geometry and chaos theory have important connections to physics, medicine, and the study of
population dynamics. [7] However, even if the field lacked these links, it would be hard for those so
inclined to resist the aesthetic appeal of most fractals.

Mandelbrot's non-traditional approach led him to invent an amazing and useful new form of
mathematics. However, no mathematician can claim to have developed his results in complete isolation
from anyone else's. Mandelbrot's discovery owes a great deal to the mathematicians who preceded him,
such as Weierstrass and von Koch, but especially to Julia, Fatou, and Hausdorff. He also benefitted from
access to computers, which allowed him not only to build upon the works of others in a new way -- one
which had definitely not been done before -- but to use his preferred method of solving problems --
namely visualisation. Furthermore, his invention also makes a case for the importance of the study of
pure mathematics: until Mandelbrot came along and united the eclectic ideas of Hausdorff, Julia, et al,
they represented very abstract mathematical ideas from varying branches of (pure) mathematics. There
is very little that would interest an ordinary biologist about set theory. However, through fractal
geometry, many of these seemingly abstract ideas (from mathematicians who are relatively unknown
outside of their own spheres of research) develop applications that other scientists and even non-
scientists can appreciate. Thus, the work that eventually led to fractals and their applications are an
excellent counterexample to the arguments of anyone who would dare to denigrate the study of pure
mathematics.