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 ...

Fractal geometry is a field of math born in the 1970s and mainly developed by Benoit Mandelbrot. If you’ve already heard of fractals, you’ve probably seen the picture above. It’s called the Mandelbrot ...

Fractals are a paradox. Amazingly simple, yet infinitely complex. New, but older than dirt. What are fractals? Where did they come from? Why should I care? Unconventional 20th-century mathematician ...

As Sigmund Freud made very clear, human beings are compelled to repeat patterns—the repetition compulsion. Patterns laid down early in life are propelled forward to recreate the familiar that can be ...

You may not be able to define “fractal” — yet — but fractals are, in fact, everywhere. As you might expect from hearing her title, Hayley Brazier, Donald M. Kerr curator of natural history at the High ...

And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum. —Jonathan Swift, from "On Poetry: A Rhapsody" The satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels might have been talking about ...

Randomness is all around you…or so you think. Consider the various shapes of the morning clouds, the jagged points of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, the twists and turns of England’s coastline and the ...

Fractals are geometric objects that are self-similar, i.e., you can break them apart into smaller pieces which are exact (but smaller) replicas of the original object. These smaller pieces in turn, ...