(PhysOrg.com) -- What do mountains, broccoli and the stock market have in common? The answer to that question may best be explained by fractals, the branch of geometry that explains irregular shapes ...

Benoit Mandelbrot, the mathematics professor at Yale who coined the word "fractal," passed away on October 14 at the age of 85. His death recalls the complicated history of his life's work -- the ...

How long is a country’s border? That’s the seemingly simple question mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson asked himself more than 75 years ago. The thing that puzzled him was that the length of the ...

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously once wrote, "A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." My mind, and assuredly those of countless others, never did after ...

Fractals, self-replicating patterns seen at varying scales, are a fascinating phenomena found widely in nature, from snowflakes to ferns and coastlines. But did you know that fractals can also be used ...

Here’s a fun project that my friend Upasana and I put together some weekends ago. It’s a visual exploration of fractals through dance, a piece of generative art that’s part performance and part ...

Two years ago, research professor Paul Bourke began searching Google’s powerful mapping program for images to add to his embryonic Google Earth Fractals web page. "I was looking for some examples ...

As a mathematical concept, the fractal can be intimidating. Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish-born mathematician who coined the term, defined a fractal as “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can ...

Introduction Do you ever wonder what mathematicians study—and why? Most of what they do is complex and difficult to understand, but fractal art might give us a glimpse. Mathematicians study fractals, ...