acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

ACM Opinion

The Father of Fractals


View as: Print Mobile App Share:
Romanesco broccoli

Romanesco broccoli has a fractal structure: Each cone-like head consists of smaller, similarly shaped cones, which in turn consist of even smaller cones. In a graph of a fractal equation, this 'nesting' process would continue infinitely.

Credit: Corbis

In nature,technology and art the most common form of regularity is repetition: a single element repeated many times, as on a tile floor. But another form is possible, in which smaller and smaller copies of a pattern are successively nested inside each other, so that the same intricate shapes appear no matter how much you "zoom in" to the whole.

From The Wall Street Journal
View Fuill Article

 


 

No entries found

Sign In for Full Access
» Forgot Password? » Create an ACM Web Account